PAUL WHITEMAN AND MARY MARGARET MCBRIDE

780.97 W59J

Whiteman

Jazz

64-09175

780.97 W59J 64-09175

Whiteman $7*50

Jazz

1 r r q LLflla

THE JAXZ DYNASTY

m

by PAUL WHITEMAN

and

MARY MARGARET M C BRIDE

Illustrated

J. H. SEARS 6? COMPANY, INC. 1926

NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY
J. H, SEARS & C(X, INCORPORATED

Pubtislud, May,
Second Printing, May, 1386

OOPTBIGHT, 1028, Y

THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Set up, Printed and Bound at the
KINGSPORT PRESS
KINOSPOKT TENNESSEE
United States of America

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Beginnings 3

II. The Mango Seed 15

III. Growing fains 47

TV. An Experiment 87

V. What Is It? 115

VI. Is It Art? 125

VII, Jazz in America 137

VIII. Tin Pan Alley 161

IX. Tricks of the Trade .... 191

X. Orchestration 217

XL On Wax 223

XIL Jazz Makers 235

XIIL One-night Jazz Stands . * . 253

XIV. The Future of Jazz . . . . 275

XV. As for Me 293

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

The Jazz Dynasty Frontispiece

The King of Jazz dons his chaps 38

Jazz welcoming Jazz back from Europe 78

Everybody everywhere, drawn by J. F. Litic 118

Jazzing the Florida boom at Coral Gables 150

Jeanne Gordon, of the Metropolitan Opera, crowning

the King of Jazz * 206

Jazz within the Law 262

Teaching the young how to Jazz 278

COVER DESIGN adapted from drawing by Jean Henry

I

Beginnings

I: Beginnings

/AZZ came to America three hundred years
ago in chains. The psalm-singing Dutch
traders, sailing in a man-of-war across the ocean in
1619, described their cargo as "fourteen black Afri
can slaves for sale in his Majesty's colonies." But
priceless freight destined three centuries later to set
a whole nation dancing went unnoted and unbilled
by the stolid, revenue-hungry Dutchmen.

For that matter, the negroes themselves knew no
more of jazz than their masters. In their tropical
home, up to the day a hostile tribe fell upon them,
they had been accustomed to make a joyful noise
with voice and drums to gods who supplied corn
and game plentifully. They had performed their
labors to the throb of the tom-tom and measured off
their journeys to the rhythm of a zither.

Suddenly the gods had become angry, delivering
their bewildered worshipers to an enemy. The

3

Jazz

blacks, harnessed each to his neighbor by a clanking
weight, were too frightened to remember the songs
of propitiation their fathers had sung, and besides,
their drums had been broken in war. They under
stood, indeed, scarcely anything of their plight ex
cept that they had been traded to the Dutchmen
for beads and rum by men as black as themselves*

They had never heard of the great "New
World" for which Spain and France and England
were fighting. They knew only that it was very
cold on the ocean after the warmth of their own
hot, sunny plains.

Even Virginia, brightest and gayest of the col
onies and the first to buy negro slaves, seemed
dreary and bleak to the Africans, So song fled
from their lips yet only for the time. Jazz,
although they did not know it, was part of their
heritage and was to be their gift to an alien
posterity.

The thrifty Dutch traders, after they had suc
cessfully disposed of their human wares and un
wittingly assured a future for jazz, returned home
to put their money in the bank and to repair piously
to church and praise the Lord for his goodness,

4

Beginnings

Meantime to the virgin continent in 1619 were
hurrying the strongest and most courageous spirits
of Europe and the failures, criminals and good-
for-nothings. The best of those who came were
ambitious, restless adventurers escaping from the
traditions and restrictions of the Old World. They
brought little of elegance or culture to their new
home; they were interested in something they re
garded as more vital. They wanted a different
order and they wanted it quickly. There was chaos
and change in Europe then, following the great
wars, just as there is to-day; but the settlers of
America wanted more change and they were not
willing to wait for it.

TheJre was great need for youth and spirit in
the New World. Food, clothing, shelter the
whole of existence had to be wrested from the soil.
Easy short cuts to living were out of the question.
The man who would not work literally would not
be able to eat.

And so those who had come to realize ideals
and those who had come to forget them, joined
from necessity in the sharp struggle for the essen
tials of life. Temporarily, at least, the New

5

Jazz

World was a completely materialistic proposition,
Even if there had been a desire for it, there was no
leisure for elegance where mere living was so pre
carious. True, the immigrants who poured in later
brought whatever of culture they had; but these
thin streams were soon lost in the immense tide of
crude hard work. Aristocracy was of strength and
youth, not of breeding, wealth or art.

Under the stimulus of the vast resources and
thrilling struggles with Indians and wilderness, the
disillusioned gradually grew hopeful and the hope
ful buoyant* It seemed there was nothing the rich
land could not be made to produce. When the
pioneers had done what they could with their hands,
they at length turned to making machinery, im
patient to enjoy better and more luxurious living.

Expansion, invention, booms became the fashion
of the times. People began to enjoy more com
forts in America than anywhere else in the world.
The mind of the country grew more and more
ingenious. We became and have remained the
most inventive nation. A diligent statistician re
cently revealed that in a single year when 5,807
patents were issued in this country, Germany, next

6

Beginnings

on the list, had only 1,083, Another demon tab
ulator has estimated that without American inven
tions it would take the hands of one billion persons
or two-thirds of the population of the world work
ing ten hours a day to manufacture all the mer
chandise consumed by the peoples of the earth,
whereas now it takes only fifty million persons!

The busy, growing days brought forth daily won
ders. Fulton's steamboat was throwing open the
Hudson and finally making ocean travel a mdre
speedy and comfortable proposition. The loco
motive, fearfully called a devil's invention because
it ran at the unheard-of speed of fifteen miles an
hour, developed from an awesome miracle to a
commonplace necessity. Lightning had come
down Ben Franklin's kite string, and was soon
electrifying the continent. The rhythm of machin
ery became the rhythm of American civilization
a clanging, banging, terrific rhythm, full of an
energy that promised accomplishment. Even the
climate, with its sudden changes from hot to cold,
its cyclones and thunderstorms, proved more in
vigorating than the climate anywhere else.

Soon there was food and to spare for everybody.

7

Jazz

Machines developed a material civilization with
unheard-of rapidity. Through them, too, was built
up a leisure class and the beginnings of an aris
tocracy of wealth. A demand for luxuries fol
lowed and the machines supplied them. The
machines supplied everything but beauty the
beauty of art, music, literature.

So far, there were no American arts. The pot
into which had been tossed many fragments of
culture had never been heated to the blending
point. Such poetry, sculpture and music as grew
up in the new land originated unmistakably in
Europe. Yet the young country held rich material.
The great melting pot was every day receiving the
substance of a nation finding itself.

The brew needed no longer to rely, for richness,
upon foreign-grown ingredients. And the leisure
class was demanding ways to spend its money
beautiful homes, books, paintings. It imported
British novelists, Italian architects, French dress
makers-

So little heed was paid to the premonitory
bubblings of the melting pot that stunned amase-
ment greeted its boiling over with the poetry of

8

Beginnings

Whitman, blunt, unconventional, startling; the
short story of Hawthorne and Poe, compressed,
vigorous, dramatically telling; the skyscraper, pile
upon pile of steel and stone reaching toward the
heavens, dwarfing all the puny efforts of the past,
crude as the New World itself, yet satisfying in
its power, its magnificent energy.

If there was surprise over these outpourings,
there was positive horror over the next, which was
jazz* Jazz, given its start in life by the righteous
old Dutch traders, had been biding its time among
the black laborers in the cotton fields of the lordly
Southern planters and the negroes lounging in the
sunshine along the New Orleans levees. It had
lost none of its primitive African swing through
mingling with the clanging of the machinery, the
broken crashing rhythm of Whitman's poetry, the
gigantic steel and stone of the skyscrapers. It was
at once barbarous and sophisticated the wilder
ness tamed to the ballroom.

A hundred million people seized it and began
to sing and dance to it. Ministers, educators,
organizations pitched into it vigorously called it
barbaric, demoralizing, degrading. A thousand

9

J dz z

headlines daily proclaimed that it was dying was
dead and ten thousand saxophones promptly
mocked the premature rumor.

Americans were ashamed of the upstart. They
kept humming it absent-mindedly, then flushing
and apologizing. Nothing so common could be
esthetic, insisted the highbrows. Like everything
else that was our own, its merits were, we thought,
questionable* So it was left to Europe to discover
the possibilities of our creature.

After Darius Milhaud had worked jazz motifs
into his "La Creation du Monde" and Igor
Stravinsky had written a jazz piece called "Rag
time," American musicians began to look interested*
Perhaps, mused they, there is more to this strange
invention than we have thought. But what is this
jazz thing? Where did it come from? Where is
it going?

The questions are still being asked, though jazz
has been more or less taken into the bosorn of
society. They have been put to me so often that
in self-defense I have set about trying to find some
kind of answer that will be adequate. That's all
this book is meant to be an answer to the ques-

10

Beginnings

tions people have asked me about jazz and my
connection with it. I have not attempted to put on
style I certainly haven't tried to be literary for
I am no writer, but only the conductor of a jazz
orchestra.

I sincerely believe in jazz. I think it expresses
the spirit of America and I feel sure it has a future
more of future than of past or present. I want
to help that future pan out. Other Americans
ought to be willing to give jazz a respectful hear
ing. If this effort of mine helps toward that end,
I shall be satisfied.

11

II

The Mango Seed

II: The Mango Seed

-^BROWN-SKINNED Indian fakir stands
in the midst of a half-bored, half -curious
street crowd. In his hand is a mango seed. His
face inscrutable, his heavy-lidded mysterious eyes
narrowed to slits, he makes a few motions and be
fore the eyes of those who watch, the mango seed
sprouts, grows, buds, blossoms and bears fruit, all
in the space of a scant sixty seconds.

America has a magic mango in jazz. One mo
ment jazz was unknown, obscure a low noise in a
low dive. The next it had become a serious pas
time of a hundred million people, the favorite
diversion of princes and millionaires. Only just
as it took centuries to produce the mango seed, so
has it taken all of human life to bring forth jazz.
The most primitive and the most modern combine
in it. For hundreds of years, savage tribes in far
places rolled out rhythms on harsh drums of home-

IS

Jazz

tanned hides, rhythms that stimulated to war or
soothed to peace as the need of the moment dic
tated. The vitality of the world's youngest nation
has absorbed, added to, and carried on that rhythm,
first in ragtime and blues, now in jazz.

There was every reason why jazz should have
burst upon a startled world at the touch of a hun
dred or more orchestra leaders in 1915. The time
was ripe for almost any explosion. The war spirit
was on the loose. The whole tempo of the country
was speeded up. Wheels turned like mad. Every
factory was manned by day and nigljit shifts.
Americans and the term included Slavs, Teutons,
Latins, Orientals, welded into one great mass as
if by the gigantic machines they tended lived
harder, faster than ever before. They could not
go on without some new outlet* Work was not
enough and America had not yet found out how
to play. The hard-pressed, hard-working young
country had no folk songs, no village dances on the
green. The incredible pressure was bound to blow
off the lid and it might conceivably plunge a whole
nation into nervous prostration or insanity. Psy
chologists, real and pseudo, sensing this danger,

16

The Mango Seed

issued long technical warnings, quoting their mas
ter, William James, on the peril to mental machin
ery of stimuli which, upon being received and
recorded, are not acted upon.

Meanwhile was brewing in New Orleans a
restorative for the national nerve complaint. The
great American noise, jazz, was then just drifting
out of the shanties and tango belt to begin its
ascent into the ballrooms of the cultured. A show
man, Joseph K. Gorham, gets credit for first real
izing the possibilities of the underworld waif.

Gorham, a newcomer to New Orleans, heard a
group of musicians playing on the street to adver
tise a prize fight, He was halted first by the per
spiring, grotesque energy of the four players. They
shook, they pranced, they twisted their lean legs
and arms, they swayed like mad men to a fantastic
measure wrung from a trombone, clarinet, cornet
and drum. They tore off their collars, coats and
hats to free themselves for a very frenzy of
syncopation. As a finger-snapping black listener
put it, they played "like all the debbils was atter
'em."

With the sure instinct of the good showman,

Jazz

Gorham pushed his way through the crowd and
interviewed the leader. He discovered that not
one of the players in Brown's orchestra, as the odd
group called itself, could read a note of music.
Nevertheless, the showman knew that he had made
a find and he listed the conductor's name with an
address on Camp Street for future reference. He
did not then note down the aggregation as a jazz
band, though he undoubtedly knew the word as a
slang phrase of the underworld with a meaning
unmentionable in polite society. Probably it had
never then been applied to a band. The rise of the
term was interesting. It reached the drawing room
finally on the strength of its terse expressive virility.
On the way up, it was variously a verb and a noun,
generally denoting speed or quick action of some
kind. It appears now to be firmly established as a
member of that long list of American words in
good social standing that began their careers in
the depths of moral and social disgrace.

Brown's orchestra was never officially labeled
jazz, I believe. There is considerable discussion
over exactly who did invent the term, "jazz band/'
with many authorities giving the honor to Bert

18

The Mango Seed

Kelly of Chicago, who described a group of musi
cians that he hired out to the Boosters' Club at
the Hotel Morrison in Chicago as a "jazz band."
The Boosters' Club promptly raised all its prices,
alleging that the new-fangled jazz came high.

But before this, Brown's orchestra had been
taken over by Mr. Gorham and placed at Lamb's
Caf6, also in Chicago. The players burst upon the
unsuspecting pork-packer world with a bang that
nearly shattered the roof. The manager discreetly
telegraphed Mr. Gorham to call off his band.
Gorham, worried, rushed to send two wires, one to
the manager counseling patience, the other to his
band, telling them to ease down a little.

Apparently they did, for they were allowed to
stay on with great profit to themselves and the
establishment, people being turned away in droves.
This, so far as I can discover from cabaret history,
was the honest-to-goodness beginning of jazz.

Since Mr. Kelly's experiment with the word,
there have been hundreds of attempts to find a new
name for modern American music, but the public
refuses them all. They are used to "jazz" and the
word expresses something the music seems to mean.

19

Jazz

I cannot see that it matters much. Sometimes I
have regretted the origin of the word because I
think it probably has stirred up sentiment against
the music. But if jazz turns out to be a good
product, it won't really make much difference what
it is called. Words, like men, slip down or climb
up in the world and when a word has made good
and stands for something real and worth while, I
would never be the one to bring up its past
against it.

It is a relief to be able to prove at last that I
did not invent jazz* I took it where I found it
and I wish the preachers and club lady uplifters
who put on sheets and pillow cases to go jazz-
klanning wouldn't concentrate on me. I don't de
serve it, really, nor the snorting editorials from
Burma to Sydney, either.

All I did was to orchestrate jazz. If I had not
done it, somebody else would have. The time was
ripe for that. Conditions produce the men, not
men the conditions. It merely happened that I was
the fortunate person who combined the idea, the
place and the time. At least, I think I was fortu
nate. Others are not so sanguine.

20

The Mango Seed

The details of my family and home life are per
haps not important to anybody except myself, but
I shall relate some of them here partly because, like
everybody else, I enjoy recalling my youth, and
mostly because of the stories I am always having
to deny about my early life. Apparently jazz
gives you a past whether you've had one or not. I
should at least like folks to know that Mother and
Dad did their best for me and that their best was
very fine, even though I did take to jazz.

Wilberforce J. Whiteman, my father, is the
best-balanced man I know. For thirty years, he
was director of musical education in the Denver
schools. He never had a drink until he was fifty-
five and never smoked until he was sixty. Yet he
wasn't priggish in the least. He has always been
keen on athletics and was really proud of me the
time the Denver Y. M. C. A, named me among a
dozen physically perfect fellows in the gym class.
He was plumb disgusted when I began to get fat
and used to try to make me box it off.

Mother sang in oratorio and in the Denver choirs
when I was growing up, managing a home and a
career easily before women began to make so much

21

J a xx

of the idea. Her singing was always an enchant
ment to me. She used to rehearse while she cooked
and she certainly could and can cook* Her
mince pie would hold any home together, and as
for her pop-overs well, in my time I have gone
from New York to Denver for a pop-over.

My mother is more than six feet tall and comes
of a family noted for height. Her father, Sam
Dallison, was a yeoman in Queen Victoria's guard.
He was six feet three inches tall, and his five sons,
born in this country, were all over six feet* My
father's name was originally Wightman and on that
side of the house, I am a mixture of Irish, Scotch,
English and Holland Dutch.

I was, then, actually bom into music, though I
can't say I take much stock in the family stories
that no matter how mad I was as a kid, I would
always stop squalling to listen to a soprano voice*
And I expect the doting aunt who claims that I
used to cry to the" chromatic scale is gifted with a
loyal imagination. As for the legend that I jiggled
my feet to "Hearts and Flowers" at the age of six
months well, that's on a par with the picture
of me at the same period sitting naked in a bowl.

22

The Mango Seed

Both the legend and the picture, to my great em
barrassment, used to be trotted out for company
until I got old enough to make an effective stand
against such indignity.

Better admit that I was no prodigy, even if I did
love music from the first time I heard it. Perhaps
I got the taste when I accidentally rolled down a
Colorado mountain with a violin and a watermelon
at the age of nine months. But more likely I in
herited the music part, at least.

An astrologist friend looked at the stars on my
birthnight (March 28, 1890) and predicted that I
would have a stormy career. I've often wondered
if she meant jazz. She said the planets were all
whizzing eater-cornered when I was born. There
were also a number of hurricanes, cyclones and
earthquakes in places like Portugal, Gautemala and
Buffalo, Nellie Bly went round the world in
seventy-two days that year and a branch of the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union was founded
in Cleveland.

I have one sister, Feme, who started taking vocal
lessons when I got my first violin. Luckily we lived
in a big house with wide lawns between us and the

23

Ja

z z

neighbors. Cooped up in a New York apartment
house, I shudder to think where we'd have landed.
In a police court probably. Even as it was, a new
neighbor once rushed over pell-mell in answer to
what he mistook for a frantic call for help. Sis
and I were practicing a high note simultaneously.

The house was always full of brass bands and
singers touching high C, partly family and partly
guests, I began making my share of the family
noises when I was three. On my toy violin, Dad
taught me to pick out some tunes that I used to
play for company, I had to wear velvet pants and
submit to being patted on the head by dear old
ladies; but I was a roughneck just the same and
fairly accurate with my fists, so the fellows knew
better than to call me sissy. I guess they wouldn't
have anyway, though, come to think of it, for most
of them liked music nearly as well as I did*

That was Dad's doing. Before he got through
explaining music to them, every kid in Denver was
crazy for a trombone or a French horn. He told
the taxpayers they ought to finance music in the
schools, just as they did plumbing, and finally they
began to* A rich man named Wilcox got so in*

24

The Mango Seed

terested in the idea that he put up the money to
buy instruments and instruction for boys who
couldn't afford them and we had some corking
amateur orchestras. Father organized oratorio
orchestras, too, and we all played in those. I was
in one from the time I was ten.

Lots of boys who got their musical training from
Dad make good money jazzing now. I've had some
of them in my orchestra. I often think how lucky
I was to grow up in Denver. In most places, I'm
quite sure the boys of my generation would have
tabooed oratorio orchestras as sissy and I wouldn't
have wanted to disagree with the crowd. That
would have been a tragedy, not because the world
would have lost anything in losing me as a musi
cian, but because I would have lost the thrill of
doing the thing I do best and like most. There is
nothing so sad to me as a misfit a man or woman
who hates his or her job and mopes at it.

Naturally as a youngster, I had no aspiration
toward missionarying and the idea of some day try
ing to convert America to music as a he-man's in
terest wouldn't particularly have appealed to me
as an ambition, even had I thought of it.

25

Jazz

Yet that's what jazz is doing to-day and I am
glad to feel that whatever I contribute is helping
the good work along. It was just a question of
time, though, until somebody would have attempted
to put jazz on a real musical footing. If I had not,
then some other boy from Denver might have. Or
if not from Denver, then from one of the other rare
spots in America where honest-to-gosh boys took
music as part of their lives, real as the ole swimmin'
hole or stealing watermelons.

My notion is that the chief contribution of the
white American to jazz so far has been his recogni
tion of it as legitimate music. And he would never
have seen beauty in it if he had always set music
up on a pedestal as something too high and holy
for everyday life. The trouble with people who
think of music in that way is that they don't really
know its history or its meaning in terms of human
life. They are ignorant worshipers of European
culture or imitators of it. They complain that
Americans have no art because we are not content
to borrow or steal the admirable and beautiful
things of another land.

Our attitude does not necessarily mean that we

26

The M ango Seed

do not appreciate what other countries have done,
but why shouldn't we scout around a bit for our
selves, pioneer fashion? I didn't get the pioneer
ing instinct very early, of course. Like all kids, I
hated to practice and at seven, when I was gradu
ated to a better instrument, I was supposed to
practice an hour a day. Seemed as if I always had
something important on hand when that hour came
round and pretty soon I was deliberately cutting.
The report of my defection, as those things will,
seeped through to the head of the house. He called
me on the carpet. I explained, with what I thought
was logic, that I didn't like to practice.

He fixed me with a cold eye. I fidgeted, ex
pecting chastisement then and there. But he only
said: "Well, Mother, we can lead the horse to
water, anyway." From then on, every afternoon, I
was locked into Mother's sewing room with my
fiddle. I sulked and threatened to run away to
sea. Nobody made any objection. In fact, nobody
paid a great deal of attention to me, except to see
that I was locked up promptly.

Then I had another inspiration which I quickly
put into action. I smashed the violin, banging its

27

Jazz

head over the flywheel of the sewing machine. The
explosion was most satisfactory, something like a
custard pie factory blowing up. The family
noticed me all right that time. And Dad invited
me to the woodshed-
Later he said: "Son, you can put in your
practice hour to-morrow cutting the lawn. You
know you've got to pay me back what that violin
cost." At the end of five years, I was still sawing
wood to pay for that expensive instrument!

As I got older, music affected me kind of like a
fever. I couldn't even bear to hear Mother sing
the "Erlking J> around the house. If I were taken to
the opera, I was sick and weak for a whole day
afterward. Perspiration stood out all over me as
soon as the music began and I was like a person
in a trance until it stopped.

It is a good deal like that even to-day. "Par
sifal" is my favorite opera, but I'm little good for
a week after hearing it. I have always thought it
would be a pleasant way to end this existence if
one died listening to that immortal music. Yet
these days I mostly go to a musical comedy, or a
laugh show, if I have a night off. They are safety

28

The Mango Seed

valves. That is why they are so well patronized.
So is jazz a safety valve.

As a boy, my heroes were Paderewski, Harold
Bauer, Kreisler and Isaye. I was taken to hear
them when they played in Denver and sometimes
was allowed to go with my father back stage.
They were always simple and cordial. Kreisler
once let me play his violin and indulgently asked
if I liked its tone. The others were just as kindly
and unaffected. That seems to be the way of the
truly great. I have yet to see a real genius with
the big head.

I must here confess for the first time to a
thwarted ambition. Once I had all my plans set
to become a mechanical engineer. In my spare time
I tinkered with engines, but not very successfully.
For instance, I made a motorcycle and forgot to
put on the pedals and brakes. And I built a launch
that would run everywhere except in water. My
summers were spent in such experiments at a farm
we had up in the mountains. I lived outdoors and
hunted, fished and swam. I guess it is a good thing
I inherited a certain musical knack from my par
ents, for I lack stick-to-itiveness. Yet I invariably

29

Jazz

admire most the hard things. That is what first
attracted me to jazz. The popular idea is that
jazz is a snap to play. That is all wrong. After
you have mastered your instrument, it is easy
enough to qualify in a symphony by following the
score as written. But a jazz score can never be
played as it is written. The musician has to know
how to give the jazz effect.

The nearest to jazz I can remember as a boy was
a thing called "Tale of a Bumblebee," which made
an impression on me because the title page was
decorated with a bumblebee sharpening his tail on
a grindstone.

At sixteen I started ragging of course we hadn't
heard of jazzing then the classics. A friend and
I won a good deal of notice with this trick from
the older members of the Denver symphony in
which I had then begun to play. They used to
keep us at it for hours. Our favorite classic for
jazzing was the "Poet and Peasant" overture.

The warden of the Nebraska Insane Asylum
heard us and thought our music might soothe his
patients. He invited us down for a week-end at
the asylum and we played all the pieces we knew.

30

The Mango Seed

We made a great hit, especially with an old fellow
who called himself Nero, He had a fiddle of his
own and tried to imitate us. I have heard jazz
opponents say that Nero probably jazzed while
Rome burned. I'm sure this Nero would have, if
there had been any Rome to burn.

I got my education in music from my father and
the teachers he selected. All were serious and tal
ented musicians. One was Max Bendix, for whom
I worked later in the San Francisco symphony. I
can't remember the time when I didn't know the
feel of a bow in my hand, and my first lesson was
taken from rny father when I was such a baby that
I actually have no recollection of it.

At seventeen I was chief viola player in the Den
ver symphony, and three years later I went to the
Pacific Coast to seek adventure. I found the ex
citement I craved in the San Francisco exposition
and played with the World's Fair orchestra until
the exposition closed. I was at the same time a
member of the Minetti String quartette. When the
exposition ended, I looked around for something
new to do. By that time I was dissatisfied with
symphony work. The pay was poor and there was

31

Jazz

little chance for initiative. And then along came
jazz!

We first met jazz and I at a dance dive on
the Barbary Coast. It screeched and bellowed at
me from a trick platform in the middle of a smoke-
hazed, beer-fumed room. And it hit me hard. I
had been blue all day, starting with the morning
when I got out of bed on the wrong side. I am
superstitious sometimes and that was one of the
times. I cracked my shaving mirror. There was
a button off my coat. My coffee was cold, my
three-minute egg hard-boiled. I spilled the salt.
It rained. At rehearsal my fiddle went blooey. A
wisdom tooth jumped. When the old second vio
linist groaned that a musician's life is a dog's life,
I bitterly agreed.

By evening I wanted nothing but bed or the
Bay. Then Walter Bell, a fellow musician,
dropped in and said, "Let's make a night of it,"

"You may make a whole week of it if you
like," I grouched. "I'm going to bed."

But Walter was a determined man and he was
set on taking me out with him. Brute force finally
won. Walter picked the jazziest of the jazz

32

The Ma n g o Seed

places to cheer me up, he said. We ambled at
length into a mad house. Men and women were
whirling and twirling feverishly there. Sometimes
they snapped their fingers and yelled loud enough
to drown the music if music it was.

My whole body began to sit up and take notice.
It was like coming out of blackness into bright
light. My blues faded when treated to the Georgia
blues that some trombonist was wailing about. My
head was dizzy, but my feet seemed to understand
that tune. They began to pat wildly. I wanted to
whoop. I wanted to dance. I wanted to sing. I
did them alL Raucous? Yes. Crude undoubt
edly. Unmusical sure as you live. But rhythmic,
catching as the small-pox and spirit-lifting. That
was jazz then. I liked it, though it puzzled me.
Even then it seemed to me to have vitality, sin
cerity and truth in it. In spite of its uncouthness,
it was trying to say something peculiarly Ameri
can, just as an uneducated man struggles un
grammatically to express a true and original idea.

I wanted to know jazz better and it was imme
diately clear that I was going to. Coming, as I
did, from an environment where music was taken

33

Jazz

for granted as a sort of daily necessity, jazz never
did really shock me. It only worried and obsessed
me. The fantastic beat drummed in my ears long
after the strident echoes had died, and sleep for
nights became a saxophonic mockery. Strains pes
tered me like a hunch you can't get the hang of.

In those first days I never thought seriously of
taking up jazz playing, yet in the back of my mind
was the conviction that I ought to turn over a new
leaf soon if I wanted to amount to anything. It
was one of those crises that, I suppose, come into
every boy's life. You get to a place where you
wear out your interest in all the things you are
used to doing and need something fresh and ex
citing td keep you from becoming a loafer and a
ne'er-do-well. At least it was so with me.

If I stayed with the symphony, I was pretty sure
to continue following the line of no resistance. A
viola player could go little further than I had
already gone. Ready-made scores and methods of
playing made it unnecessary for me to attempt any
originality. And I had such stores of vitality to
be turned into some channel. If there was no
chance for it to go into my work, it was likely to

34

The Mango Seed

be diverted to wild parties. It was a requisite of
a good symphony player in those days that he be
a good drinker, anyway and that he be a good
buyer of drink for his superiors.

Don't imagine for a moment that all this mor
alizing was clearly worked out in my mind. I only
knew that I was listless, dissatisfied, despondent.
Of course I had money troubles, too. All of us
had. We often took extra jobs to make ends meet,
I drove a taxicab myself for a while, and even
then was usually broke.

Then jazz stepped in.

I have to smile when I start presenting jazz in
the role of reformer. I hope no reader will hiss
us off the page. I have often felt, when peda
gogues and parents were panning my protege, that
I ought to speak up and defend it as a moral agent.
Because it did pick me up and, more or less, in the
good old phrase, "make a man of me."

Not that I cherished any such hopes of it. I
began to experiment with the new music because it
was interesting. That is to say, soon after I heard
jazz for the first time, I resigned my job with the

35

Jazz

symphony and applied at Tait's in San Francisco
for a place in a jazz band.

I got it and for two days lived in a sort of daze.
The thing that rattled round me like hail wasn't
music in the sense I had known it, I couldn't un
derstand it couldn't really get the hang of it.
But others were getting it fat-faced men who
had never in their lives listened to any music ex
cept cheap thin popular tunes rouged, young-old
women who had never once heard a real concert.
Something happened to them, just as it had hap
pened to me that first night something that shook
off their false faces and made them real and human,
spontaneous and alive for once. It wasn't alto*
gether sex appeal, either. What on earth was it?

"Jazz it up, jazz it up," the conductor "would
snort impatiently at about this point in my reflec
tions. And I would try, but I couldn't. It was as
if something held me too tight inside. I wanted to
give myself up to the rhythm like the other players.
I wanted to sway and pat and enjoy myself just as
they seemed to be doing. But it was no good.

The second day the director fired me. He was
kind enough, but brief.

36

The Mango Seed

"You can't jazz, that's all," he told me. I
nodded dully, watching the red hat of a girl at the
other end of the room bobbing in an ecstasy of
syncopation. Then I walked out of Tait's mild as
milk and went home to my hall bedroom and slept.
I slept clear around the clock. When I woke up, I
was mad.

So they said I couldn't jazz, did they? Well,
I'd show 'em. I'd learn to jazz. I'd learn if it
took a year.

You know the thirst for knowledge that attacks
the ambitious young man in the advertisement,
when he reads about mail-order training courses?
I felt just like that; but though there are plenty
of them now, there were no correspondence-school
jazz courses then, so I had to invent a method of
educating myself.

This was to visit the restaurants where jazz was
being played. A difficulty arose here. I had no
money and they expected you to order food and
drink in all those places. My old awe for head
waiters increased during this time about a thousand
fold. They were so muscular. I had never noticed
what brawny fellows a restaurant uses for head-

37

Jazz

waitering. In an argument with them, one would
be nowhere at all.

Luckily I had a fairly presentable dress suit left
over from symphony days. In this, I made a
moderately prosperous-looking figure and there
really was no way that a head waiter who didn't
know me could tell that I hadn't a dime in my
broadcloth pocket.

My cue was to appear when the music was at its
height. I would hang around the entrance as
though waiting for somebody, but really studying
the orchestra. If necessary, I would make an effort
to get a special kind of table such as head waiters
give only to best-paying patrons. Of course, with
out the proffer of kale, I had no chance, and thus
my way would be paved for an indignant retreat.
The drawback was that this trick couldn't be used
more than once on a restaurant.

These, as you might say, mere snatches of study,
I eked out with experiments in my hall bedroom.
Two landladies put me out during this period, on
complaint of tenants above and below; for I ex
perimented with my violin, as well as with paper
and pencil. There were no saxophone-proof apart-

38

THE KING OF JAZZ DONS His CHAPS

The Mango Seed

ments in those days. No wonder the architect who
invented them stands to make a fortune.

After many attempts, I finally worked out an
orchestration and learned what I wanted to know
about faking. Faking was what the early jazz or
chestras relied upon. That is, they had no scores,
each man working out his part for himself, "faking"
as he went along. Up to that time, there had never
been a jazz orchestration. I made the first and
started into the jazz orchestra business. That
sounds simple, but it wasn't. The first hundred
days of any business have their discouragements and
there was nobody hankering for the opportunity
of financing my jazz band not after I got myself
fired because I couldn't jazz!

However, I managed to borrow a few hundred
dollars on personal credit to guarantee my em
ployees' salaries. What I could scrape together
wasn't enough to guarantee any salary for myself,
though, and so in those days I learned a good deal
about plain living and high thinking.

It was slow work collecting men, because I
wanted only those who could realize what I was
trying to do. I hardly knew myself, except that

39

Jazz

I saw possibilities in the music if it could be put
on a scored, trained basis. The usual jazz orches
tra gang was no good for my purpose and neither
were the more set-in-their-way symphony players.
I needed musically trained youngsters who were am
bitious, slightly discontented and willing to adven
ture a little.

In San Francisco band circles I became known
as a sort of nut, I think. At any rate, all the men
that other leaders couldn't handle because of freak
or stubborn streaks came to me, as one nut to an
other, I suppose. Occasionally one of these did fit
into my scheme exactly as if he had been created
for it. At last I frad seven men of spirit and
enterprise.

Then the War broke out. We got the news in
the midst of a rehearsal. And the rehearsal, of
course, broke up. In the following twenty-four
hours, I tried all recruiting stations within walking
distance and got turned down. In spite of recent
thin living, I weighed almost three hundred pounds
and the rules said I was no good for "combatant
purposes/*

After much argument, Washington ruled that I

40

The Mango Seed

could enlist as a band leader ^nd I finally put on
a Navy uniform, especially made. I had lost my
seven picked men, but the Navy offered plenty of
material for experimentation. Best of all, we had
discipline, so that the trombonist couldn't get off
practice whenever he had been out late the night
before and the French horn never dared pipe a
word about headaches.

Though I led a band, I had plenty of superior
officers, too, and I learned something about being
disciplined as well as disciplining. I was paid
forty-two dollars a month and got it a good deal
more regularly than later when I was paying other
men forty times that.

At that, it was a grilling sort of life, and after
I was out, I was all nerves. I was short of funds,
too, and so there was no chance of starting my own
orchestra again. As a stop-gap, I took charge of
the Fairmont Hotel orchestra in San Francisco. I
would direct a punchy number and then I would go
out of sight and cry for ten minutes. This went on
until I lost exactly a hundred pounds, falling off
in three months from 285 to 185. When I went
to a doctor, he told me to stop work and worry,

41

Jazz

I told him I had a fat chance. It looked to me
as if Td be worrying until I died. And right here,
perhaps it is all right for me to say that there is
a good deal of truth in the old proverb that it is
never darker than just before dawn. I am not
much on the Pollyanna stuff, but after all, I have
known what it was to lose my ambition and my
nerve and my health and find them all again.

There I was, a symphony player determined to
break into something that the best people then con
sidered the lowest of the low. It didn't look as if
I had much chance to get anywhere, did it? Or
jazz, either, for that .matter. Yet not long before
in New York, if I had only known it, something
had happened that showed the mango magic was
working.

The original Dixieland Jazz Band had come East
and been hired by the Reisenweber Cafe, Up to
then, New York had not heard any jazz. Chi
cago and New Orleans had, and San Francisco, but
not New York, where after all, modes are made.
Reisenweber' s made something of a point of the

band's debut raised the cover charge and boosted

42

The Mango Seed

the food prices. The dancers came, too, but when
they heard the music, they didn't know what to
make of it.

The band played an entire jazz selection. Not
a soul stepped out on the floor. The cafe man
ager, standing on the side-lines, was ready to weep
with wretchedness. The men guests were suddenly
conscious of their high collars and the women of
shoes that hurt. And there sat the unhappy band,
banging away, surrounded by a scene as festive as
a funeral.

Finally the manager, desperate, dry-lipped, but
determined, raised an arm to halt the incompre
hensible music.

"This is jazz, ladies and gentlemen," he
pleaded. "It's to be danced to/*

Perhaps it was his woe-begone countenance that
relieved the strain. At any rate, somebody laughed
and every gentleman grabbed his lady and began
to cavort. Bang, bang, slap bang, hip hooray!
Jazz had hit New York and New York had gone
down before it.

In two years the thing had sprung from New

43

Jazz

Orleans to Chicago, from Chicago to San Fran
cisco, had taken rough form and overrun the con
tinent, had captured New York and spread from
North to South and from East to West with only
isolated portions of New England and New Eng-
landism holding out against it.

Ill

Growing Pains

Ill: Growing Pains

o// REPORTER who came once to get a
success story from me complained that I
hadn't undergone enough hardships to make me
worth writing about. He explained that to be of
any real value for his kind of tale, I should have
gone to work at twelve to support an invalid
mother and fourteen small sisters and brothers of
assorted sizes. Another thing he deplored was that
I hadn't "fought my way up." In fact, he inti
mated that it seemed as if I had risen without a
great deal of trouble and then promptly slid down
again of my own accord. That was his far-from-
flattering estimate of jazz and jazz players and he
is not alone in it.

It is true that I have only been broke at in
tervals and that, even then, I might have called
upon relatives for help if I had been so minded.
But just the same, I feel as if jazz and I have

47

Jazz

come over some pretty rough roads together. We
have had to fight for every inch of recognition we
have ever had, and folks have never spared our
feelings if they felt inclined to tell us what they
thought of us. They still consider us fair targets,
as far as that goes. Every day or so, somebody
emphasizes my horrible jazz present by referring
to my honorable symphony and string-quartet past.

I am less vulnerable to such digs now that I'm
standing on my own legs with a clear idea of what
I am trying to do. And I don't mind admitting
that having the price of a good-sized meal in my
pocket adds a lot to my self-confidence. You can't
get away from human nature at least I can't and
I have no patience with the idea that art and
starvation are twin sisters.

It's quite all right to starve for an ideal if you've
got to, but in America you don't starve long if the
ideal is worth starving for, in the first place. There
is no country in th,e world where the common
people, so-called, reward sincerity and honest effort
in any line as lavishly as ours do. In that respect,
it's a case of America's virtue being her own pun
ishment, for it seems to be the fashion in certain

48

Growing Pains

high-brow groups to say contemptuously that we
haven't any artists because none of them is starving.

What the jazz group is trying to do may prove
in the long run to be worth while, or it may not.
Only time will show. The point I am trying to
make is that we believe in jazz. We didn't chuck
our honorable places among honorable musicians
just to go out after the filthy lucre, not by several
tinker's dams. We claim we're still musicians, per
haps even better musicians than we would have been
if we hadn't strayed off the straight and narrow
paths allotted by convention to first-rate members
of our profession.

At the same time, I want to make it clear that
the financial side of recognition means just as much
to me as it does to any man. I stand a good deal
firmer on my legs, because, when I slap my pocket,
I can hear a reassuring jangle of coin in it.

There was a sorry time when legs and pockets
gave out all at once. That was after the War when
I broke down at the Fairmont and had to give up
my orchestra and take to bed for several months.
For a while, then, I really did debate whether I
hadn't better give up and let the I-told-you-so's,

49

'Jazz

who said jazz would bring rne to no good end, have
it their own way.

I didn't, but when I finally got well, I hadn't a
penny and was warned by my doctor not to take on
much responsibility or hard work for a while. I
finally set out to build up a band at the Potter
Hotel in Santa Barbara. My old pre-war men
were too expensive to be thought of in this new
venture, so I had to make my new start with raw
recruits.

These came chiefly from the high school. Bright,
ambitious, nice youngsters they were, thrilled about
jazz and eager to learn. The trouble was, not one
of them had been taught to read music. Our re*
hearsals had to be conducted by ear and I had to
build my boys into my musical idea without a trace
of musical foundation. It was like making writers
of free verse out of children who didn't know the
alphabet. When a lad who could read notes ap
plied for a job, I hailed him as manna from
heaven, and he turned out to be the worst of the
lot. He knew no more about music than a parrot
knows about grammar.

Those untrained children, with their eager desire

50

Growing Pains

to learn, made me realize what could be done by
the schools if they would only take hold. Why is
it that wealthy patrons of music will pour out mil
lions for symphonies and not a cent for music in the
public schools? It's my idea that every child ought
to go to school with books under one arm and a
horn or some other instrument under the other.
Music that is, music that they play themselves
arouses the interest of boys and girls alike, and is
sure, I believe, to make the bad ones good and the
good ones better.

From what I have seen, it seems to me that most
music teachers must be teaching music as Latin
teachers teach Latin as though it were a dead
language, something without any meaning in real
life, something to be learned by rote. Music is a
language all right but a living, changing, vital
language. The solemn respect some people give it
belongs only to things dead and canonized.

One of those Santa Barbara boys, a little chap
who played the cornet, once woke me out of a
sound sleep at 4 o'clock in the morning because he
had forgotten how a difficult scoring ran. He was
so interested that he didn't seem to think of apolo-

51

Jazz

gizing for his unceremonious call, taking it for
granted that I would feel just as he did about the
urgency of the situation. He said he couldn't
sleep for thinking of the music, so he got up and
walked five miles to reach first aid.

Probably he didn't wake me up, anyway, for I
was losing considerable sleep myself just then over
the conditions that were making it impossible for
me to carry out my plans for an experimental or
chestra. Hardly a day passed that I didn't get
some new idea for scoring or instrumentation, but
I didn't have and couldn't get an adequate lab
oratory for testing my inventions. The more I
worked with jazz, the surer I was that its authentic
vitality would take root and develop on what I
called a symphonic basis. I was longing to try it,
anyway. A painter must feel like that when he is
confronted with an extraordinarily paintable sub
ject and there are no brushes in reach.

Saving money became suddenly a passion with
me spendthrift that I had always been. I wanted
to save now because I wanted to be able to afford
a good orchestra. For a while I led a sort of wan
dering minstrel life, directing orchestras in Pasa-

52

Growing Pains

dena, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as oppor
tunity came.

It was at the Maryland Hotel in Pasadena that
I was presented to the king of the Belgians, who
requested that I be brought up after he had heard us
play. It was the first time I had ever been intro
duced to royalty and I got all mixed up on what
to call him. Ever since, I have been afraid that I
addressed him as "king," but I have never dared
ask anybody.

He was very gracious, anyway, and asked some
questions about certain of the queer noises mean
ing the saxophone and clarinet effects. I explained
as best I could, getting sort of red and flustered,
and then he said I should come to Europe some
time and play, and somebody mercifully led me
away to a corner where I could mop my brow in
peace and wonder just how many bones I had
pulled.

Intent on making as much money as I could as
quickly as possible, I joined a group which played
for dancing at the beach hotels on a the-dancer-
pays-the-fiddler plan. We musicians were equipped
with a big can into which our patrons threw dollars

S3

Jazz

in return for jazz. At first this made me miserably
ashamed, for I felt as if I were acting the cap-
holding monkey for the hand-organ grinder on a
street corner. But my need for money was so great
just then that, when I saw the coins pouring in, I
abandoned my scruples.

We players walked about among the crowd, and
when one piece was finished, we waited for some
body to feed the can before we started another.

The movie folks were good customers so good
that we often allowed credit to the more reliable
ones, including Charlie Chaplin. When they were
dancing with someone they liked, they would hold
up their fingers to indicate how much they were
willing to pay to have the dance prolonged. We
followed them around with our eyes and, as long
as they'd continue to hold up fingers from time to
time, we would continue to play* We enjoyed it
and if some little girl from the provinces was
dancing with a movie hero, she certainly did, too.

Once it cost an Iowa grocer sixty dollars to keep
a certain film varnp for six dances. People began
to drop away from the floor at the fourth dance
without a pause between. During the fifth, only a

54

Growing P azns

few couples still hung on and when we were going
fervently on into the sixth, the last of them puffed
off the floor and still the lowan danced on. It was
before the days of cutting in, so he was safe enough
as long as his wind held out but he was fat, and
perhaps thrift began to stir in the back of his mind,
for during the sixth he held up no more fingers.
When we stopped, he came breathless off the floor
and we tackled him for our money. He tried to
shade the price until one of our number basely sug
gested that perhaps he would rather have us send
the bill back to his home town. Then he came
through.

It wasn't pretty, but it was certainly life
absurd, ridiculous, chaotic, full of vigor, change,
excitement and battle. Meantime, I was slowly pil
ing up some money and hanging on doggedly to my
ambition. But if it hadn't been for John Hernan,
Fm not sure Fd have held out. Hernan, a Cali
fornia hotel man, was the first person who ever
believed in me and my jazz enough to risk money
on his belief.

One day when I was feeling blue, he came up
to me.

55

J a z z

"Think you could make good with a real or
chestra if you got the chance?" he asked me
casually.

"Aw, what's the use of talking?" I muttered, not
even looking at him. "I haven't got the chance/'

"How do you know?" he shot back, and there
was something in his voice that woke hope in me.
I grabbed him by the arm just as he was pretending
to walk off.

"What do you mean?" I begged, and I expect I
hurt his arm with the grip I had on it.

"Well," said he, preparing to dodge thanks by
fleeing round the corner, "I've just guaranteed your
salary for a month to the management of the Alex
andria in Los Angeles. You start the thirteenth."

Another time that "thirteenth" might have given
me superstitious pause, but this was one occasion
that I didn't even think of it. We did open on the
thirteenth, too, and I'll never forget that first night
if I live to be a million years old.

Word had got about among some of my friends
in the movies that I was making my debut at the
Alexandria. They rallied full force for the occa
sion, all dressed up and in joyful mood. They

56

Growing Pains

clapped and we played on and on and on better
than we had ever played at rehearsal, better, I
sometimes think, than we have ever played since.

I guess some of the crowd must have gone out
between dances and telephoned friends to come on
over, because couples kept pouring in. I can see
them all now Charlie Chaplin solemnly bur
lesquing my conducting while everybody roared,
Pauline Frederick, Mabel Normand, gayest and
prettiest of all, Harold Lloyd, Cecil de Mille but
it would take a blue book of the films to list them
all.

You see, in spite of the stories you hear about its
illicit gayety, Hollywood gets pretty dull of eve
nings and the stars were glad enough to have some
thing new to do. Wallace Reid was there, I
remember, and played the drum with the orchestra.
He often came in after that to try out the drum or
saxophone. We were always glad when he chose
the saxophone because it was easier drowned out.
Poor Wallie was a fine fellow and a splendid actor,
but not much of a drummer or saxophonist.

Of course, we were pleased that the first night
went off so well, but we knew we weren't out of

Jazz

the woods yet by a long shot, so the next day and
the next and the next, we tried harder and harder,
I suppose I must have slept some during that time,
but I can't remember any periods of sweet, dream
less ease. Our first-night customers stayed with
us and so many more came that, at the end of the
month, John Hernan was told we had made good
and would be kept. At the close of the year, sym
phonic jazz had proved so successful that the
Alexandria's cover receipts had risen from $300 to
$1200 a day.

It would seem that I should have been earning
plenty of money by this time, but I was not. Start
ing on a shoestring as I had, we adopted the
cooperative plan in the orchestra. I was to have
the largest share of the proceeds. That was all
right as far as it went, but the difficulty was that
whenever one of my men threatened to accept a
better offer, I had to take something off my own
salary to keep him satisfied.

One day a fellow came up with a telegram.
Without a word, he handed it to me and I read an
offer from another leader at $25 more than he was
getting.

58

Growing Pains

"Well?" he prompted, when I didn't speak.

The reason I didn't speak was that I was figuring
how much I could cut down on what I was keeping
for myself and still eat regularly. He was a good
man and I wanted to be fair with him. Finally
I said: "Will a thirty dollar raise be all right?"

He said it would and hurried off, jubilant. That
week and for many weeks following, I paid him
thirty dollars of my own money until one day I
found he had faked the telegram. He hadn't even
had another offer.

The men averaged $100 a week. I got sometimes
as little as $40 and felt myself lucky. Indeed, for
a time after I was leading a successful jazz orches
tra and getting a lot of publicity for it, I was barely
scraping by from week to week.

It was not until much later, when we began to
make records, that dissatisfaction arose among the
men over the cooperative system and we gave it
up. It wasn't very fair. For instance, in making
a record, the drummer, who might strike his cymbal
once in an entire number, got the same as the man
who played five or six instruments and worked
every second of the time. After that, I paid each

59

Jazz

man a straight salary, varying according to his
ability and usefulness. And from that time, I be
gan to make some real money for myself.

For quite a while I did the arrangements and
orchestrations, as well as the conducting, but it was
too much for one man, so we took on Ferdie Grofe,
talented symphony player and composer. Now the
two of us work out our ideas together.

The chance for the orchestra (or band, as we
called it then), to go East, came when the Ambas
sador Hotel at Atlantic City was opened. S. W.
Straus agreed to lend us the money to make the
trip. He gambled to the extent of $2,600 on us.
But it was all right. We made good and he got
his money back.

Until we went to Atlantic City, the only recog
nition we had won, aside from the approval of
those who danced to our music, came from persons
interested in our trick of jazzing the classics that
is, of applying our peculiar treatment of rhythm
and color to well-known masterpieces.

The notice this brought us was not always of
the pleasantest. Certain correspondents called us
scoundrels and desecrators and one man described

60

Growing Pains

us as ghouls "bestializing the world's sweetest har
monies," rather a mixed metaphor, it seemed to me.
A woman with a gift of epithet termed us "vul
tures, devouring the dead masters."

I don't get mad at these communications and I
always read them. Sometimes I can even see jus
tice in them. Besides, it's good to know the worst
that people think of us. But of course I don't agree
that we have done such very terrible things to the
classics. I don't think we've even insulted them
much.

I worship certain of the classics myself and re
spect them all. But I doubt if it hurts Tschaikow-
sky or even Bach when we rearrange what they
have written provided we choose appropriate
compositions of theirs and play to people who
haven't heard good music before.

I have never had the feeling that I must keep
my hands off the "dead masters," as people feel
they must not speak the truth of the dead unless it
is a complimentary truth. The masters are not
dead to me. I think of the great writers of music,
not as gods who finished their jobs forever in seven
days, but as plain human men, as human as any of

61

Jazz

the rest of us. They were working on a job that
will never be finished as long as human beings live,
for music is as much a part of life as the heart
beat. Every human being has music in him if he
would realize it and let it out. The masters had
genius where probably, at the very best, I have only
talent; but they didn't care a bit more about beauty
than I do or try any harder to capture it. And
they didn't scruple to take any material they could
lay their hands on to help them, either.
You remember the verse of Kipling's:

"When 'Orner smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
'E'd 'card men sing by land and sea;

An 5 what 3 e thought 5 e might require,
'E went an* took, the same as me,"

Not that I mean to imply that there was any real
musical value in our jazzing the classics. Of course
not. It was partly a trick and partly experimental
work. We were just fooling around with the near
est material, working out our methods.

The old masters are not the best material we can
use. A jazz orchestra is better off when playing
scores that have been written expressly for it- By
degrees we are accumulating a library of our own

62

Growing Pains

music. But that's another story to which I shall
return later.

The prospect of the trip East frightened even
while it thrilled us. California was home to most
of us and while the folks there hammered us oc
casionally, they also humored us. We might be
wild, but we were theirs and they were fond of us.
The effete East we always spoke of the East as
effete had no personal interest in us and might
do worse than scorn it might ignore us.

So we were nervously uneasy as we swung
aboard the transcontinental express bound for New
York and points East. Atlantic City was like a
new world a world we didn't like so very well at
first. Indeed, after a few weeks of it, the boys
begged to go back to the Coast.

The golden sunshine and the whole-hearted
camaraderie of California had taken on increased
enchantment as the distance between us widened.
My gang didn't think folks were very friendly in
Atlantic City and they claimed the Atlantic Ocean
was vastly inferior to the Pacific. Even the neck
ties in the shops were sadly lacking in pep, they
complained. In short, they were good and home
sick.

63

Jazz

Moreover, the Ambassador Hotel was out of the
beaten track, being far up the Boardwalk and we
were newcomers, unknown to the East, so patronage
did not exactly rush our way.

I've always maintained it was a girl who finally
started us on the road to popularity. I don't know
her name or where she came from. All we have
ever known about her is that she had yellow hair
and brown eyes and danced like a wood nymph.
One listless, gloomy day when we were playing for
a handful of people, she walked into the room with
a typical masculine tea hound. She was bored and
showed it. He tried to make conversation and she
pouted.

Then the music started. They danced, and to
our delight, she began as the trombonist put it, "to
snap out of it." We all felt an interest in her.
The next day she came again, bringing a whole
tableful. After that, she rarely missed an after-
noon and she was always accompanied by a large
party. Business fairly bounced out of its depres*
sion. We never spoke to the girl nor she to us, but
we knew she was press-agenting us all over town.
We certainly were grateful, too,

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Growing Pains

Even though we eventually did well at the Am
bassador and began to pay Mr. Straus back, we
might have gone home if the Victor Phonograph
Company had not held a convention at Atlantic
City. A representative of theirs, Calvin Childs,
happened to lunch at the Ambassador and heard us
play.

After that, I felt as if I were being rushed for a
fraternity at college. Childs came up and fervently
insisted that we do nothing about a phonograph
contract until he had time to communicate with
his firm. Only six of our men had come East and
I suggested that he wait until he could hear us all.

"We sound much better full force/' I apologized.

"Nonsense," he incredibly responded, "you can't
be much better than you are now. 'S not possible !"

And a few days afterward, we got a nice, fat
two-year contract. That was the beginning of so
many unbelievable cyclonic happenings that we be
gan to get used to miracles. The Palais Royal,
largest cafe in New York City, waved a contract at
us. Vaudeville scouts approached us. Our pictures
were in the papers. Sometimes, of course, things
still went awfully wrong; but on the whole, we

65

Jazz

were in good danger of getting our heads turned.

To the Palais Royal came all the country's great
names and foreign visitors of renown, too. Any
night at all, we could look out and see Vanderbilts,
Drexel Biddies, Goulds and the rest dancing to our
music. Lord and Lady Mountbatten, cousins of
the Prince of Wales, were among the distinguished
guests one night. ( They had just arrived in this
country to spend their honeymoon.

After that night, they came often, for they
adored dancing. They were such a friendly, jolly
pair that when they were in the room, we invariably
played almost nothing but their favorite pieces.
We had many conversations, and Lord Mount-
batten got to be friends with every boy in the band.

"You've simply got to come to London," he kept
saying. "The Prince must have a chance to hear
the band that's all there is to it."

And after the pair had gone back to London,
there came a letter with crests and coronets on its
seal, telling us again that we must come to London
where Lord Mountbatten himself "wanted the
pleasure of presenting us to the Prince."

Part of the result of our New York vogue was

66

Growing Pains

that smart hostesses began to want us for private
parties. The first of these, at the home of a very
rich, very well-known New Yorker, was almost a
fizzle. Up to this time, we had played for private
parties only in California, where nearly everybody
knew us. There we were all fairly prosperous, with
small cars of our own, well-fitting tuxedos and no
idea at all that anybody was better than we were.
So, while we played for the guests for pay, we al
ways ate in the dining room and received the same
consideration from the host that any visitor to his
house would get.

But the East, it seemed, was to be different.
Orchestras were hired by the social secretary to play
for an entertainment and then turned over to the
butler to look after. So when I got to the house
in question on the night we were to play there, I
found all the men out in the street.

' What's up?" I asked amazed.

"Well," said the biggest sax player, " we didn't
know what you would want us to do. They told
us, when we rang the front doorbell, to go round
to the servants' entrance. We aren't going."

I went to the front door and obtained an audi-

67

Jazz

ence with the rather flustered and embarrassed
host.

"My men don't wear second-hand tuxedos nor
eat with their knives and they are a good deal like
gentlemen," I told him casually.

After that, we were always treated just as we
had been in California.

Into the midst of our already busy days, about
this time came a contract for a season with the
Ziegfeld Follies. The first night we played with
them was one of the most miserable I ever spent*

We were seated on a platform designed to move
forward. When the time came for it to start, it
didn't. We had stage fright, anyway, and the fail
ure of the mechanism to move on schedule fairly
froze the smiles on our faces. We played on, but
I thought we sounded worse than the worst dress
rehearsal we had ever had. And then, when we
weren't expecting it, the platform gave a leap like
a skittish colt, flinging us forward and almost
knocking our teeth down our throats.

I thought, of course, we were a flop and wouldn't
even read the papers the next day. But to my

surprise, I heard they spoke not so badly of us and

68

Growing Pains

the next night we got on fine, platform and all.

New York is a queer city. I have the theory
that novelty, not luck or ability is what gets by
there. New York doesn't care about merit so much
as it does about something new to tickle its eyes,
its palate or its ears. The newspapers reflect this.
It is a city of press agents and I used to wonder how
they all lived.

"It's easy enough/' one told me, "New York
city editors like press agents who produce the goods.
They don't want you to pretend with them, but if
you have a story, that is different; they will give
you the front page any time."

The bizarre and the unusual get not only the
headlines, but the homage and shekels. Naturally,
anything new has always an army of imitators and
soon one's vogue wears out. There is nothing real
or lasting in novelty alone.

We realized that to New York we were just a
novelty at a dull season, something to make the
great city stop, look, listen and dance for the
time. We had a hankering to be taken seriously.
We even believed that there was something worth
while about jazz danceable, as it was. We were

69

JazZ

doing the best we could with it and once in a while
there was the satisfaction of hearing a flapper hum
ming really good music without knowing it was
good something we had "sold" her.

But no one took us seriously. At that stage, it
wouldn't have done to say anything about jazz
being an art, even a lively one. The artistic would
merely have scoffed and the flapper and her beaux
would have looked sheepish at being accused of a
liking for anything that was highbrow. Altogether,
I thought it would be a good time to get out of
New York, for a while. And since I had seen, as
everybody must see, the American adoration for
the European, I played with the idea of going
abroad. I knew singers, nice American boys and
girls, who were unable to get a hearing in their own
country until they had studied in Italy or France.
They were not particularly improved by the Euro
pean period that I could see. On the contrary
they usually lost something whatever it was that
made them distinctive. But the point was, they
had gained what the public seemed to want them
to have foreign flavor. Especially if they re
turned wearing a foreign name.

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Growing Pains

I figured that my orchestra would probably get
more serious consideration for what was in the back
of my head to do, if we obtained a little of the
foreign stamp for ourselves. And we wouldn't need
to bring back any Russian prefixes or French suf
fixes, either.

The end of it was that we sailed for Europe,
March 3, 1923, on the S. S. President Harding,
American line. We were a strictly American bunch.
Most of us had never been abroad. Wild West
erners all, we had managed to adapt ourselves to
Broadway, but Europe was something else again.

There was a terrified lump in my throat as the
Statue of Liberty curtsied out of sight. I had a
premonition we might better have stayed at home.
The boys, though, were excited and confident.

"Lookut what we did to New York," one en
couraged me, as I was loudly proclaiming on a very
seasick day that I wished we hadn't come. I was
risking $18,000 of my own money on the trip and,
in spite of the fabulous salary the newspapers cred
ited me with receiving, that much ready cash looked
mighty big to me, especially as I had got married

71

Jazz

in New York and was learning what it costs a
lady to shop on Fifth Avenue.

The moment our ship dropped anchor at Liver
pool, it seemed that rny premonition had not been
groundless. Our coming had been heralded, and
the British Ministry of Labor was waiting for us.
We had been engaged to play in "Brighter Lon
don," a revue at the Hippodrome, and the matter
of labor permits had been, we thought, fixed up.

Now, however, we found we had another guess
coming. The Ministry of Labor had an idea we
had better not land. We were finally allowed to
set foot on English soil, but were told we would
not be allowed to play, so to speak, in English
air. The matter became, in a way, international.
We cabled our own Secretary of Labor to help us
out, and the politico-legal tangle grew more than
jazzy. England objected to us, so far as I could
make out, on the ground that, if American jazz was
once heard in England, tens of thousands of Eng^
lish musicians, unable to play it, would be thrown
out of employment. Our success was taken for
granted, which was very flattering, and I could
only hope that the belief was based on the fact that

72

Growing Pains

some member or members of the Labor Commission
had heard us play. But flattery wasn't much com
fort if we were to be sent home unheard.

At length we were given permission to play in
"Brighter London/ 3 but were denied the right to
take the orchestra to a restaurant or supper club.
Finally we got around that restriction, too, by hir
ing the same number of English musicians as we
had Americans, and were allowed to play at Graf ton
Galleries, a night club. Our recruits never seemed
to get the hang of jazz, though. There was some
thing about it that was perfectly foreign to them.
Perhaps they took it too seriously. But since that
was what I had been praying for seriousness in
considering it I suppose I shouldn't have minded
that.

I remember one day asking one of my English
musicians, "Can you. ad lib?" Perhaps I should
mention that "ad lib" is a jazz musical term mean
ing to improvise, to invent as you go along.

"Certainly," answered the man, rather nettled,
"I can ad lib anything."

"Then do it," I requested.
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Jazz

"All right, just write something for me to ad
lib/ 3 he agreed.

Orchestra leaders used to come to our rehearsals,
bringing their men, and we were glad to show them
what we could. They played beautifully, too, so
long as they could imitate. Give them a perfectly
scored jazz orchestration and they could do it so
well that it sounded like the real thing. But when
it came to originating, they fell down. Jazz was
simply not in their blood. They lacked the spon
taneity, the exuberance, the courage I do not
know what. The something, whatever it is we call
American, the indefinable something that is jazz.
They didn't have it and it isn't something that can
be put on the outside like a plaster. Most of the
jazz orchestras that have since sprung up in London
have failed simply because of that fact.

There was plenty of opposition to us, even apart
from the labor trouble. "Why should a man check
his mentality with his hat at the door?" inquired
a distinguished British organist, when somebody
tried to bring him to hear us play at supper. And
many felt the same way.

The most unsuccessful benefit I ever played in

74

"Growing Pains

my life was one at Albert Hall for the air service
hospitals. In the first place, my band of twelve
pieces followed one of seventy. The place was too
big for us and I am sure we did sound awful. Just
the same, we were hardly prepared to have the man
who had asked us to play the benefit come up after
wards and tell us it was positively the worst band
he had ever heard. Still, that's usually the way of
benefits. People seldom appreciate what they get
for nothing.

We had a good time in London, though, and
after they got over their prejudices, some of the
Londoners seemed to like us. Certainly we liked
them. I was especially fond of their bathtubs,
the largest I have ever seen. And their bobbies, or
policemen, that are bigger still.

One day I saw a huge bobby calmly lift one of
those tiny English cars right out of the road when
it came farther than he had directed it. Another
time, Mrs. Whiteman was driving down Bond
Street and happened to see a coat she liked in a
shop window. She almost forgot her wheel in her
effort to see the price tag.

75

Jazz

The bobby at the crossing called out, "What's
the matter? 55

"Oh, I 5 m sorry," she told him, "I was just trying
to see the price of that coat in the window."

He turned toward the window. "The green
one? Well, it's forty guineas. Now drive along,
madam." And all with a wide smile.

We were introduced to the autograph habit in
London. I never knew we had it here until re
cently, when everybody seems to have got the bug.
But in England, they appear always to have had it.
People carry fat little books into the subway, the
ater and street, stopping persons they happen to
recognize.

Once I was unwittingly a source of income to
some sharp little English messenger boys. A small
girl stopped me as I was leaving the Hippodrome
and when I finished writing my name for her, some
people came running over from a queue forming at a
theater on the other side of the street. I wrote my
name until my arm ached and suddenly I realized
that the same two urchins were coming back again
and again. They were selling the autographs for
a penny apiece to the queue.

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Growing Pains

The orchestra played at Grafton Galleries every
evening after the performance at the Hippodrome
and often we were honored by the patronage of the
Prince of Wales, The first time I saw his Royal
Highness, however, was about a week after we
landed. True to his promise. Lord Mountbatten
gave a party for the Prince and asked us to play.
There were just thirty-two guests, all related to
the throne and it was the nicest party I ever went
to. There was no swank and no ostentation. The
guests were all simple, cordial people who knew
how to enjoy themselves.

The Prince had already arrived when I went
into the room, but I was so nervous that I couldn't
tell him from any of the others. I had a bad at
tack of stage fright and I wished I were somewhere
else. Lord Mountbatten was disgusted with me.
He is such a democratic, unassuming chap himself
that he can't imagine anybody getting into what he
calls a "funk" over a mere meeting with a prince.

"What on earth shall I call him?" I wanted to
know, distractedly.

Lord Mountbatten looked at me disappointedly.

"Why, you aren't a British subject," he re-

77

Jazz

minded me. "What do you call anybody? Just
be natural."

I hope I was natural, but If I wasn't at first, I
was later; for the Prince put me instantly at ease
with some flattering comment about the orchestra.
He was wearing evening clothes and I thought I
had never seen a man's shoulders look better in such
dress. The Prince of Wales is really rather small,
but for some reason, partly the way he carries him
self, I suppose, you never realize it, even in his
pictures.

I saw him many times after that evening. Some
times we played for parties he or others gave at
private houses; and whenever he wanted me, in
stead of sending an equerry to "command" my
presence, he would come himself and ask in friendly
fashion if it would be convenient for us to play.

We never accepted any pay from him. He in
sisted upon it many times, but I told him we had
come to London mostly to play for him and con
sidered it honor enough to have that privilege. We
did, too, and it wasn't altogether because he was
a prince. Everybody does things for him because
they like him so much, and I believe, if he were

78

Growing Pains

just plain John Smith, he would still have the
winning personality that gets favor for its owner
everywhere. I am sure of one thing if the world
were choosing a king, the Prince of Wales would
win the crown by popular acclaim.

As a host, he was splendid. The first night we
played for him, I caught my drummer rushing out
of the house.

"What on earth's the matter?" I called, worried,

"I'm goiix 3 to cable my old man that the Prince
of Wales served me champagne with his own
hands," he shouted back.

The reason the Prince did not entertain at York
House where he lives is that he keeps bachelor's
hall there. So when he wants to give a party, he
must borrow a house somewhere.

His Royal Highness is an extraordinarily good
dancer, I should say, with a splendid sense of
rhythm. Perhaps that is one reason he likes the
drum so much for its rhythm. He told me he got
his first drum when he was four and immediately
learned to beat it under the tutelage of some old
soldier around the palace. It is not strange that
royalty should be captivated by the drum, for their

79

Jazz

entire lives are measured by its beats. When they
are born, the drums are beaten to tell the story.
When they are married the drum comes into play
again, and when they have an heir or go to war
or die.

The drummer with our orchestra explained all
his tricks to his Royal Highness and claimed also
to have learned a special rat-a-tat from his pupil.
The papers always play up any preference of the
Prince so energetically that I think he sometimes
feels he will never again say what he does like. He
did confess, though, that he is fond of the ukelele
and the bagpipes. He learned to play the pipes at
Oxford and there is a story that his friends (for he
was a regular good fellow and into all the life of
the school) stole into his room one night and pricked
the air from his favorite bags because they got so
tired of hearing him practice. They also changed
his title to the "Prince of Wails."

We all addressed his Highness quite informally
as Prince. He once remarked upon this habit of
Americans who, he says, Prince him until he feels
like barking. The quality I liked most in young
Edward Albert was his consideration for others. I

80

Growing Pains

saw a hundred instances of it with his personal at
tendants and others who served him. He noticed
that a saxophonist was absent one night and asked
solicitously if he were ill. When next he saw the
man, he remembered to inquire all about his grippe.

I have never seen such a memory for everything
facts, names and faces as the Prince has. It
was after I came back to America that he visited
Canada. I sent him a message asking him to the
re-opening of the Palais Royal. He couldn't come
and later, when he reached New York, the first
thing he said to me was: "I was mighty sorry I
couldn't come to your opening, but I was way up
on my ranch and didn't get your message until too
late to make it."

The orchestra members were all delighted when
Clarence Mackay, arranging a great ball in his
Highness's honor, asked us to play. That was a
gorgeous party the beautiful Mackay estate on
Long Island, with its flowers and lights and the
prettiest women in the country decked in their finest
gowns and jewels. We were counted three times on
our way into the house, the last time by Mr.
Mackay himself. Guards were everywhere and the

81

Jazz

invitation cards were watched as if they had been
jewels, for it was a safe bet that a lot of the city's
"celebrity hunters" would try to force their way in.
The Prince, on the occasion of this, his second visit,
had become more popular and more interesting
than ever, so that he was not allowed even breath
ing time away from watching eyes. But Mr.
Mackay was determined he should have at least
one partly undisturbed evening.

As far as that went, the guests at the ball were
almost as interested in the royal guest's movements
as the outside world was. Every time he came on
the dancing floor, there was a sound like the catch
ing of breath and every woman there watched him
with wistful eyes. For of course, he might, just
might, ask her to dance.

He was his usual pleasant self with us and sev
eral times asked for favorite pieces to be played.
He also asked me if I would send him the record
of the "Rhapsody in Blue."

Of course, this is really getting ahead of my
story, for the visit of the Prince to this country the
second time and the party at the Mackays' all came
after my return from London. We came back

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Growing Pains

really because we got homesick. Funny we had
a wonderful time in England and when we had
been in New York and thinking of ourselves as
Westerners, we hadn't cared so much for the East.
But in London, we suddenly began to feel that
Broadway was superior to Bond Street or the Rue de
la Paix or any other street we had ever seen.

We had some good offers to stay in London and
a group of capitalists in Paris wanted to build a
theater for us if we would come over there. But
we had been working hard for a long time on an
enterprise that was as close to my heart as home
itself, and I wanted to get back to New York and
try it out.

All this time, you see, we had been testing, dis
carding and endeavoring to get volume with the
instruments we had, and trying also for harmony
and sweetness. We weren't quite ready for the
experiment I wanted and yet dreaded to spring, but
I thought we needed the American atmosphere
for rehearsals. So we sailed back again to America.
And if you'll believe it, all was quite as I had
dreamed it might be. New York received us with
open arms gave us a great reception, as if we'd

83

Jazz

been distinguished foreigners coming on a visit.

We caught sight of Liberty and of airplanes
filled with bands almost at the same minute. They
serenaded us from the air, from the water and from
land. The Mayor sent a representative down the
Bay to meet us and so did the Police Department.

That night at the Waldorf they gave us a dinner
a dinner with speeches by all sorts of personages
and such a greeting that we couldn't believe they
meant us at all. When they asked me to make a
response, I found tears rolling down my cheeks.

It is a great thing, after a long hard struggle,
to find success and appreciation. For a moment, I
forgot any cynicism I had felt about the false value
of the European label in America. Cynicism
doesn't take deep root in an American, anyway. I
only felt happy, touched, almost overcome by the
warm-hearted generosity of our welcome home. It
seemed to me then that everybody understood me,
that my orchestra was a real success, that there was
nothing in the future but sunshine and roses. But
even at that moment, I didn't forget that we had
come home to do bigger things in jazz than had
ever been done before. If we could.

84

IV

An Experiment

IV: An Experiment

7 JlSIONS of playing a jazz concert in what a
critic has called the "perfumed purlieus" of
Aeolian Hall, used to rouse me up at night in a cold
perspiration. Sometimes a nightmare depicted me
being borne out of the place on a rail, and again I
dreamed the doors were all but clattering down
with the applause.

That's the way I lived during waking hours, too,
all the time I was planning the Aeolian Hall ex
periment alternating between extremes of dire
fear and exultant confidence.

We began to rehearse for the concert as soon AS
we came back from England. The idea struck
nearly everybody as preposterous at the start. Some
hold to the same opinion still. But the list of
pessimists was a little shorter, I believe, when at
half-past five, on the afternoon of February 12,
1924, we took our fifth curtain call.

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Jazz

"What! an all- jazz concert?" one of my best
friends, a musician, shouted when I confided my
plan to him in strictest secrecy. "Why, my boy, it
simply can't be done. You mustn't try it. It
would ruin you! You have your future to think
of and your reputation. So far you've been get
ting on splendidly with your dance music and if
you watch your step, you will undoubtedly be able
to put away a good smart sum while the vogue
lasts. But a jazz concert! Honestly, my boy,
I'm afraid you've got softening of the brain. Be
guided by me in this and you will never regret it,"

Such expressions were naturally depressing, espe
cially since I myself realized that I was gambling
with public favor. There were plenty of similar
warnings from other friends and those who weren't
in that category said even worse things. I was
called "fresh," "publicity-hungry," "money-mad"
and some of the musicians I most admired, who
had until then regarded me with, a slightly amused
but tolerant air, now talked themselves red in the
face about the insolence of jazz boys who want to
force their ridiculous efforts upon the world by
the world meaning, I suppose, their own little

88

An Experiment

coterie, the final court of critical appeal in their
opinion.

Here's something I have never been able to
understand. Why should it be supposed that all
the good taste in the world is monopolized by a
few people? Isn't it possible that the so-called
masses have considerable instinctive good judgment
in matters of beauty that they never get credit for?
My notion is that beauty is for everybody, that
anything too precious for the common gaze is out
of place in a world God has created for ordi
nary people. That's why I resent the self-assurance
of certain high and mighty art circles.

However, it was not a time for me to start any
arguments. And anyway, in spite of all my fine
theories, I was mighty anxious to win the approval
of the select few. It wouldn't be enough for me
simply to gather into Aeolian Hall a capacity audi
ence of flappers and dancing men. We had to have
the musicians, the critics, the music students the
type of man who takes music seriously as vocation
or avocation. Even the one who takes it solemnly
although that isn't at all my idea of the way it
should be taken.

89

'J a z z

It's extraordinary, when you think of it, how
timid we all are about our own opinions. We may
like something but we don't like it until we find
that someone who is supposed to know says he likes
it. I forget who said, "Stand a sheep on its hind
legs and you do not have a man; but stand a
flock of sheep on their hind legs and you have a
crowd of men"; but he was nearly right. And
deep down in each one of us there is, after all,
something sheep-like. We hate to go in any direc
tion until we look around to see if someone else
has started that way.

So a great many people, in their timidity, smother
their own natural tastes. This is especially true,
it seems to me, in music. This idea that the arts
are so high and fine that an ordinary common man
can't really know anything about them is combined
with our natural timidity. As long as the critics
condemn a new musical development, the common
man may like it, but he is shame-faced about it.
"I don't know anything about music," he says.
And most of the time he doesn't have the nerve
to go ahead and add: "But I know what I like."

Now as a matter of fact, critics are just human

90

An Experiment

beings like anybody else. The only difference is
that they aren't afraid to say that they know what
they like. They have had opportunities to study
a lot about what I may call the superstructure of
music. They know technique and a whole language
of musical terms. But the foundation of music
or any other art is in human emotion. The com
mon man who doesn't know counterpoint from
harmony, may know what he likes that is, what
appeals to his deep, fundamental, human emotions
as well as any critic. In fact, he may know it
better, because his musical education doesn't get
in the way. His approach to music is more simple
and direct. And in the history of art, it is a fact
that only the art the common people have recog
nized and loved stands the test of time.

The American people ought to have more cour
age in their attitude toward the arts. Perhaps then
they would realize that their own opinions about
music have some importance. Or perhaps they
might if they knew a little about how critics are
made and musicians, too, for that matter.

Some people seem to think I've climbed upon
some high mountain peak of importance just be-

91

Jazz

cause I'm one of the leaders of the new music. But
what am I, when you come down to it? Just a
Denver boy, who had some knowledge of musical
technique pounded into me when I was a kid. I've
spent my life learning more and more about tech
nique, but I know no more about music, the deep
meaning of the tone harmonies that arouse the
depths of the human soul, than any man who re
sponds to it.

And the critics well, I know one in San Fran
cisco who was a police reporter and probably never
would have been a critic if the regular one hadn't
been on his vacation one day when a concert was
scheduled. The city editor Sent the police reporter
to report the concert and he turned in a good story.
So when the regular critic quit, the police reporter
was put on music. And now when that critic says
a conductor is good, all San Francisco agrees with
him.

A dramatic critic on a New York afternoon sheet
was offered more money by a powerful morning
combination and accepted precipitously. A rewrite
man came in to work as usual that day and was
assigned by the managing editor to cover an im-

92

An "Experiment

portant play that night. With fear and trembling,
but like the good soldier that a well-trained news
paper man always is, he went. The next day, he
was appointed dramatic critic.

The point I'm making isn't that these men
haven't sound opinions, worth listening to. They
have. But what I want to say is that Denver
boys who haven't grown up to conduct orchestras
and police reporters who haven't got jobs as critics
have sound opinions, too, and we ought to listen to
them. When all the musicians and critics of to
day are dead and dust, it's the verdict of these ordi
nary, musically-uneducated men that will stand.
It's their opinion that will determine whether or
not we are remembered, just as, I'm bound to
say, it was their opinion that kept "Abie's Irish
Rose" running in New York for a record-breaking
number of seasons after every critic in town had
flayed it,

If I'd been willing to wait a few centuries for
a verdict on my work, I wouldn't have been so
wrought up over the Aeolian Hall concert. But
here I saw the common people of America taking
all the jazz they could get and mad to get more,

93

Jazz

yet not having the courage to admit that they
took it seriously. 1 1 believed that jazz was begin
ning a new movement in the world's art of music.
I wanted it to be recognized as such. I knew it
never would be in my lifetime until the recognized
authorities on music gave it their approval.

My idea for the concert was to show these
skeptical people the advance which had been made
in popular music from the day of discordant early
jazz to the melodious form of the present. I be
lieved that most of them had grown so accustomed
to condemning the "Livery Stable Blues" sort of
thing, that they went on flaying modern jazz with
out realizing that it was different from the crude
early attempts that it had taken a turn for the
better.

My task was to reveal the change and try to show
that jazz had come to stay and deserved recogni
tion. It was not a light undertaking, but setting
Aeolian Hall as the stage of the experiment was
probably a wise move. It started the talk going,
at least, and aroused curiosity. "Jazz in Aeolian
Hall!" the conservatives cried incredulously,
"What is the world coming to?"

94

An Experiment

While we were getting ready for the concert,
we gave a series of luncheons for the critics, took
them to rehearsals and explained painstakingly
what we hoped to prove, at the same time display
ing our orchestral tools for the enterprise. They
were good sports and many offered helpful, though
doubtful, encouragement.

That took one weight off my mind, for I saw
that they were at least curious enough to come to
the concert. But just the same, I was good and
scared. We were trying to get a favorable hear
ing from the most hide-bound creatures in the
world educated musicians. It was educated musi
cians who scorned Wagner, resisted Debussy and
roasted Chopin, you may remember. What, then,
could we expect? Annihilation, perhaps.

I trembled at our temerity when we made out the
lists of patrons and patronesses for the concert.
But in a few days, I exulted at our daring, for the
acceptances began to come in from Damrosch,
Godowsky, Heifetz, Kreisler, McCormack, Rach
maninoff, Rosenthal, Stokowski, Stransky. We
had kindly response, too, from Alda, Galli-Curci,
Garden, Gluck and Jeanne Gordon. Otto Kahn

95

Jazz

and Jules Glaenzer agreed to represent the patrons
of art on our roster and the prominent writers we
asked were equally obliging. These included:
Fannie Hurst, Heywood Broun, Frank Crownin-
shield, S. Jay Kaufman, Karl Kitchin, Leonard
Liebling, O. O. Mclntyre, Pitts Sanborn, Gilbert
Seldes, Deems Taylor and Carl Van Vechten.

Anybody who has breathlessly, almost unbeliev
ingly, watched a precious ambition finally flower,
will not think me maudlin when I confess that I
used to pore over that list the way one does over
a new picture of one's self, scanning it again and
again for the mere pleasure of looking.

Perhaps I have emphasized what some readers
may regard as the least important feature of the
projected concert the audience. But it was, after
all, the main item, being uncertain. Before I began
on it, I had the orchestra ready with a program I
believed would launch our test adequately. I
wasn't afraid of that angle. My boys had been
playing what I called interesting music in a crowded
restaurant where clattering dishes, staccato talk and
laughter interfered with "reception," as the radio
fans term it. At Aeolian Hall, the orchestra would

96

An Experiment

have a fair chance to put over our musical message
to a judicial few.

That concert cost $11,000. I lost about $7,000
on it. The program alone, together with the ex
planatory notes, cost $900. We rehearsed for .many
weeks and since it was outside our regular work,
every rehearsal meant extra pay for the men. Nine
musicians were added for the occasion and their
salaries also piled up the total.

I didn't care. It would have been worth it to
me at any price. But never in my life had I such
stage fright as that day. I had no doubt of the or
chestra. But how would people take it? Would
we be the laughing-stock of the town when we woke
the "morning after"? Would the critics decide I
was trying to be smart and succeeding in being only
smart-alecky? Or might I be able to convince the
crowd that I was engaged in a sincere experiment,
designed to exhibit what had been accomplished in
the past few years with respect to scoring and ar
ranging music for the popular band that we were
making a bona fide attempt to arouse an interest
in popular music rhythm for purposes of advancing
serious musical composition?

97

Jazz

Fifteen minutes before the concert was to begin,
I yielded to a nervous longing to see for myself
what was happening out front, and putting an over
coat over my concert clothes, I slipped around to
the entrance of Aeolian Hall.

There I gazed upon a picture that should have
imparted new vigor to my wilting confidence. It
was snowing, but men and women were fighting to
get into the door, pulling and mauling each other
as they do sometimes at a baseball game, or a prize
fight, or in the subway. Such was my state of mind
by this time, that I wondered if I had come to the
right entrance. And then I saw Victor Herbert
going in. It was the right entrance, sure enough,
and the next day, the ticket office people said they
could have sold out the house ten times over.

I went back stage again, more scared than ever,
Black fear simply possessed me. I paced the floor,
gnawed my thumbs and vowed I'd give $5,000 if
we could stop right then and there. Now that the
audience had come, perhaps I had really nothing to
offer after all. I even made excuses to keep the
curtain from rising on schedule. But finally there
was no longer any way of postponing the evil mo-

98

An Experiment

ment. The curtain went up and before I could
dash forth, as I was tempted to do, and announce
that there wouldn't be any concert, we were in the
midst of it.

It was a strange audience out in front. Vaude-
villians, concert managers come to have a look at
the novelty. Tin Pan Alleyites, composers, sym
phony and opera stars, flappers, cake-eaters, all
mixed up higgledy-piggledy.

Beginning with the earliest jazz composition,
"Livery Stable Blues," we played twenty-six selec
tions designed to exhibit legitimate scoring as con
trasted with the former hit and miss effects which
were also called jazz. At that time I argued that
all was not jazz that was so called. I still believe
that "Livery Stable Blues" and "A Rhapsody in
Blue," played at the concert by its talented composer,
George Gershwin, are so many millions of miles
apart, that to speak of them both as jazz needlessly
confuses the person who is trying to understand
modern American music. At the same time, in the
course of a recent tour of the United States, I have
become convinced that people as a whole like the
word "jazz."** At least they will have none of the

99

Jazz

numerous substitutes that smart wordologists are
continually offering. So I say, let's call the new
music "jazz."

This, then, is the jazz program we played that
day:

TRUE FORM OF JAZZ

a. Ten years ago "Livery Stable Blues"

b. With Modern Embellishment "Mama

Loves Papa" Boer

COMEDY SELECTIONS

a. Origin of "Yes, We Have No Bana

nas" Silver

b. Instrumental Comedy "So This Is

Venice" Thomas

(Adapted from "The Carnival of Venice"}

CONTRAST LEGITIMATE SCORING vs. JAZZING

a. Selection in True Form

"Whispering" Schonberger

b. Same Selection with Jazz Treatment

RECENT COMPOSITIONS WITH MODERN SCORE

a. "Limehouse Blues" Braham

b. "I Love You" Archer

c. "Raggedy Ann" Kern

100

An Experiment

ZEZ CONFREY (Piano)

a. Medley Popular Airs

b. "Kitten on the Keys" Confrey

c. "Ice Cream and Art"

d. "Nickel in the Slot 35 Confrey

{Accompanied by the Orchestra)

FLAVORING A SELECTION WITH BORROWED

THEMES
"Russian Rose" Grofe

(Based on the Volga Boat Song)

SEMI-SYMPHONIC ARRANGEMENT or POPULAR

MELODIES
Consisting of

"Alexander's Ragtime Band" * Berlin

"A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" .... Berlin
"Orange Blossoms in California" Berlin

A SUITE OF SERENADES Herbert

a. SpanisK

b. Chinese

c. Cuban

d. Oriental

101

Jazz

ADAPTATION OF STANDARD SELECTIONS TO DANCE
RHYTHM

a. "Pale Moon" Logan

b. "To a Wild Rose" McDowell

c. "Chansonette" Friml

GEORGE GERSHWIN (Piano)

"A Rhapsody in Blue" Gershwin

(Accompanied by the Orchestra)

IN THE FIELD OF CLASSICS

"Pomp and Circumstance" Elgar

I was very proud of the suite the late Victor
Herbert wrote especially for that occasion. He was
a great-souled, wonderful musician and my loved
friend. His encouragement during the weeks we
were rehearsing meant a great deal to all of us. I
asked him to conduct the suite, and after he had
watched me do it, he almost consented to take my
place, because he thought I wasn't getting the most
out of his music.

"But I'll wait," he said, his eyes twinkling. 'Til
wait, Paul, until you've tried it a little longer and
then if I say to you, 'Yes, Fll be pleased to conduct
the Suite/ you'll know what I mean."

102

An Experiment

Evidently my conducting improved, for he told
me at last that I did very well.

"I guess I won't take the stick, Paul/' he decided*
"There would always be some fool critic to say that
I was better than you or you were better than me
and it might cause hard feeling."

He was joking, of course, for it would have been
nearly impossible for me to have felt hard toward
a genius like him and my friend as well. I relied
upon his judgment always and his approval, when
it came, was priceless, because it was so sincere. I
am glad that he was alive to sit in a box at the
first performance and bow to the cheers that greeted
the playing of his Suite. Writing for a jazz or
chestra was new to him and he complained a little
about the doubling which he said hampered him
when he wanted an oboe, say, and found the gentle
man who should play the oboe busy with the bass
clarinet.

"But I respected the rules of the game," he
boasted, "and I might even say of this Suite, in
the words of the Seventh Century nun, that even
if other people do not like it, it pleases me because

it is I who did it."

103

Jazz

"A Rhapsody in Blue" was regarded by critics
as the most significant number of the program. It
was the first rhapsody written for a solo instrument
and a jazz orchestra. The orchestral treatment
was developed by Mr. Grofe, Mr. Gershwin's man
uscript being complete for the piano. It was a
successful attempt to build a rhapsody out of the
rhythms of popular American music. None of the
thematic material had been used before. Its struc
ture was simple and its popularity has been re
markable since we put it on the records. It is
music conceived for the jazz orchestra and I do
not believe any other kind of orchestra can do it
full justice, though some have played it.

The audience listened attentively to everything
and applauded whole-heartedly from the first mo
ment. When they laughed and seemed pleased
with "Livery Stable Blues," the crude jazz of the
past, I had for a moment the panicky feeling that
they hadn't realized the attempt at burlesque that
they were ignorantly applauding the thing on its
merits. I experienced all sorts of qualms as the
program went on, most of them unjustified, as it

was.

104

An Experiment

A few of the men had accidents with their in
struments, picking up one when they wanted
another, but nobody noticed. This happens some
times when one man plays five or six instruments.
My twenty-three boys that day played thirty-six
instruments.

Perhaps it would be interesting to list the in
struments used in that first concert. The string
section consisted of eight violins, two double basses
and a banjo. There were two trumpeters, two
trombonists, two pianists, a drummer, three saxo
phonists, and two French horn players. All these
men, except the violinists and one or two others,
doubled on some instrument. These extra ones
included accordion, bass tuba, flugelhorns, eupho
nium, celesta, flute, oboe, bass oboe, heckelphone,
E-flat, B-flat and bass clarinets, basset horn, Octa-
vion, E-flat soprano, B-flat soprano, E-flat alto and
E-flat baritone saxophones.

It seemed as if people would never let us go. We
played all the encores we knew and still they ap
plauded. My heart was so full I could hardly
speak, as I bowed again and again. The spark that
a responsive audience can always kindle in the per-

105

Jazz

formers had been glowing all afternoon and, as a
result, we played better than I had ever hoped.

When finally we bowed for the last time, the
usher brought me a pile of notes from congratulat
ing friends and the doorman said people were wait
ing to see me. There was a letter from Walter
Damrosch that I particularly prize. He said he
thought we had done wonders with our instruments
and added that he had "enjoyed every minute of

it."

This friendly praise was very sweet, but I knew
I must wait for the papers to learn the best or the
worst. Later that week, the Musical Digest pub
lished a sheaf of critical comments from the dailies,
and the sentiment, not merely as we culled it for
publicity press notices, was divided, but on the whole
encouraging.

W. J. Henderson of the ^Herald described the
concert as "one of the most interesting of a busy
season. Mr. Herbert's music was delightful. Mr.
Gershwin's composition proved to be a highly in
genious work, treating the piano in a manner call
ing for much technical skill and furnishing an or
chestral background in which saxophones, trombones

106

An Experiment

and clarinets were merged in a really skillful piece
of orchestration. If this way lies the path toward
the development of American modern music into a
high art form, then one can heartily congratulate
Mr. Gershwin on his disclosure of some of the pos
sibilities. Nor must the captivating cleverness of
Zez Confrey be forgotten. And there was Ross
Gorman, a supreme virtuoso in his field, who
played ten reed instruments, and Roy Maxon and
Paul Whiteman himself, a born conductor and a
musical personality of force and courage who is to
be congratulated on his adventure and the ad
mirable results he obtained in proving the euphony
of the jazz orchestra."

"To begin with/ 5 wrote Mr. Lawrence Gilman
of the Tribune^ "Mr. Whiteman's experiment was
an uproarious success. This music conspicuously
possesses superb vitality and ingenuity of rhythm,
mastery of novel and beautiful effects of timbre.
For jazz is basically a kind of rhythm plus a kind
of instrumentation. But it seems to us that this
music is only half alive. Its gorgeous vitality of
rhythm and of instrumental color is impaired by
melodic and harmonic anemia of the most perni-

107

Jazz

clous kind. Listen to the compositions of the
Messrs. Archer and Kern and Gershwin.

"Ignore for a moment the fascinating rhythm
and the beauty and novelty of the instrumental col
oring and fasten your attention on the melodic and
harmonic structure of the music. How trite and
feeble and conventional the tunes are, how senti
mental and vapid the harmonic treatment. Old
stuff it is. Recall the most ambitious piece, the
Rhapsody, and weep over the lifelessness of its mel
ody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inex
pressive. And then recall for contrast, the rich
inventiveness of the rhythms, the saliency and
vividness of the orchestral color."

Deems Taylor of the World found "Victor Her
bert's four serenades not only charming in thematic
material, but they demonstrated the fact that his
skill in orchestration extends to handling the un
usual instrumental combinations that a jazz band
presents. George Gershwin's Rhapsody, in a way
the most interesting offering, despite its short
comings, chief of which were an occasional sacrifice
of appropriate scoring to momentary effect and a
lack of continuity in the musical structure pos-

108

An 'Experiment

sessed at least two themes of genuine musical worth
and displayed a latent ability on the part of this
young composer to say something in his chosen
idiom."

In the Times, Olin Downes mentioned "remark
ably beautiful examples of scoring for a few in
struments: scoring of singular economy, color and
effectiveness; music at times vulgar, cheap, in poor
taste, elsewhere of irresistible swing and insouciance
and recklessness and life; music played as only such
players as these may play it like the melo-maniacs
that they are, bitten by rhythms that would have
twiddled the toes of St. Anthony.

"And then there was Mr. Whiteman. He does
not conduct. He trembles, wabbles, quivers a
piece of jazz jelly, conducting the orchestra with
the back of the trouser of the right leg and the
face of a mandarin the while. Mr. Gershwin's
composition shows extraordinary talent, just as it
also shows a young composer with the aims that go
far beyond those of his ilk. In spite of technical
immaturity, he has expressed himself in a significant
and on the whole highly original manner. This is
fresh and new and full of promise."

109

Jazz

Henry T. Finck of the Post thought the "Livery
Stable Blues" and "Mama Loves Papa" far
superior to Schoenberg, Milhaud and the rest of
the "futuristic fellows. Mr. Herbert's serenades
were a delightful specimen of musical mirth, mel
ody and local color. Paul Whiteman conducted
quite as well as Herbert himself could and that is
the highest praise that could possibly be bestowed."

Gilbert Gabriel of the Sun called the concert
"one long strong, musical cocktail. Whatever it
was, fun or fol-de-rol, glorious, gory or just plain
galumphing, it was wine that needs no bush.

"The title of the rhapsody was a just one for
Mr. Gershwin's composition suitable to covering a
degree of formlessness to which the middle section
of the work, relying too steadily on tort and retort
of the piano, seemed to lag. But the beginning and
the ending of it were stunning. The beginning par
ticularly, with a flutter-tongued, drunken whoop of
an introduction that had the audience rocking. Mr.
Gershwin has an irrepressible pack of talents. The
Serenades were done in Mr. Herbert's ever-ready

and bright style. Mr. Whiteman has some amazing

110

An Experiment

musicians under him and he shines out as an ex
traordinarily well-rounded musician/*

That was what they said. Not all compliments
by any means even in some places a suggestion of
dissatisfaction with the newcomer. But after all,
the critics had come to the concert instead of send
ing second-string men. They had devoted their
lead paragraphs to it, too, and admitted its possi
bilities. Poor, imperfect, immature, it still was
going somewhere, they said. And so the mango
magic worked on.

Ill

Whatlslt?

V: What Is It?

is jazz?

I have been dodging this question for
years, because I haven't been able to figure out an
adequate answer. Probably it doesn't matter much.
Whatever I think, there will be many to disagree
with me. Jazz has always made a grand hostess
help, for it will throw the most conservative dinner
company into paroxysms of discussion and disagree
ment. It is a theme for which every man demands
freedom of expression.

It is almost easier for a word novice like me to
explain what jazz is not, than to try to say what
it is. First, then, jazz is not exactly what the
dictionary makes it. It has only got into the dic
tionary, by the way, in the last 'three years* The
nearest to it used to be "jazey, a woolen sweater."
Here is what they have inserted : "Jazz, a form of
syncopated music played in discordant tone on vari-

115

Jazz

ous instruments, as the banjo, saxophone, trom
bone, flageolet, drum and piano."

This is obviously an uninspired, colorless way of
describing a very colorful subject. Irving Berlin,
who writes jazz, does better. He calls it "musical
pandemonium accomplished by discords used in an
ascending progression/' My friend, Gilbert Seldes,
writing in "Seven Lively Arts/ 5 refers to "subdomi-
nant seventh chords, successions of dominant sev
enths and ninths and dissonances." Somebody,
whose name has been lost to posterity unfortunately,
declared illuminatingly that "Jazz is jazz and blues
is blues."

I feel a good deal the same way and so does any
body who knows jazz and blues. They explain
themselves, but if you don't know them, words fail
to clarify them. I have heard some folks refer to
jazz as an "obnoxious disease," as "musical pro
fanity," "the true voice of the age" and the "only
American art." You can readily see why I keep
hedging. Who is going to find a definition to sat
isfy all these folks?

But to get down to business, jazz does seern to
me to be, as nearly as I can express it, a musical

116

What Is It?

treatment consisting largely in question and answer,
sound and echo. It is what I call unacademic
counterpoint. It includes rhythmic, harmonic and
melodic invention.

To rag a melody, one threw the rhythm out of
joint making syncopation. Jazz goes further,
"marking" the broken rhythm unmistakably. The
great art in the jazz orchestra is a counter
balancing of the instrumentation, a realization of
tone values and their placement.

With a very few but important exceptions, jazz
is not as yet the thing said; it is the manner of say
ing it. Some critics think this fact establishes the
unimportance or even the vulgarity of jazz, I be
lieve it is true that if jazz does not develop its own
theme, its own distinctive language, it will fail to
be musically valuable. But it will do so.

We might, for clarity, make a rough parallel
between jazz and language. In 1700, the Ameri
can Colonists were beginning to speak a dialect that
might be called bad English. They used tones,
inflections and rhythms in words and sentences that
were not the English spoken at the court of King
George. They expressed themselves in that way

117

Jazz

because they were no longer living in England,
they were no longer Englishmen. By their talk
was revealed the change that had taken place.
They said the same things that were being said on
the other side of the Atlantic, but they said them
differently. That is where jazz is to-day.

It was not the fact that the Colonists spoke dif
ferently that was important. The important point
was that the Colonists themselves were different.
The conditions in which they lived made them so.
They expressed this difference first in their manner of
talking. As the difference grew, they expressed it in
the words they used, then in the ideas they uttered.

To-day there is an American language, a language
full of new words and ideas, full of meanings that
can hardly be expressed in any other tongue. A few
Englishmen still speak of the American language
as an "English dialect." But when they do, they
simply illustrate the English slowness to admit new
realities. It is as the French say to laugh.

We have a racy, idiomatic, flexible American
language all our own, suited to expressing the
American character. This, I believe, is what jazz
will be a new musical language, expressing new

"

SPAIN

GREAT BRITAIN

EVERYBODY EVERYWHERE

What Is It?

meanings. Or at any rate, fresh combinations of
old meanings which is all that any musical devel
opment has ever been.

To-day, however, jazz is a method of saying the
old things with a twist, with a bang, with a rhythm
that makes them seem new. Strictly speaking, it
is instrumental effects. A large part of its tech
nique consists of mutes being put in the brass. The
first beat in any bar, which normally is accented, is
passed over, and the second, third or even fourth
beats are accented.

This can be roughly illustrated with a familiar
bar of music. Suppose we take "Home, Sweet
Home." Here it is in its original form :

Original
. rt u i H . .

Now let us jazz it up :

Jazz Fox Trot
6 ft A ^*-r.

Jazz Waltz

That won't be quite the real thing, though. The
119

Jazz

jazz treatment is hard to put into written music.
Follow the notes as carefully as you like and you will
merely be like a person trying to imitate, for in
stance, a Southern accent unless jazz is in your
blood. If it is, you'll add the indefinable thing to
the notes that spontaneous jazzing that will
make the music talk jazz as a native tongue.

While we are still using the old themes in this
way, it isn't every composition that will lend it
self to jazz treatment. This is because music is not
only a succession of sounds. It is also quality of
sound. It is really not very satisfactory to take
anything written for a symphony and try to play it
with a jazz orchestra. That is the same, in princi
ple, as taking a composition scored for an orchestra
and trying to play it on the piano. And how would
Debussy's "L'Apres Midi d'un Faune" sound on
an organ? Imagine trying to get the tone and color
of that lovely composition in any such way.

I suppose it will surprise a good many people to
have me say that some things can't be jazzed. And
as a matter of fact, it is not literally true. Almost
anything can be played by a jazz group on jazz
instruments in the jazz manner. Anything can

120

What Is It?

be jazzed that is, subjected to jazz treatment.

But it is not fitting to jazz everything. And
common sense, together with a loving knowledge
of music, will indicate whether to jazz or not. I
might mention fdr instance "Onward, Christian
Soldiers, 1 ' which should not be jazzed. There is a
sturdy, majestic tune with a religious connotation.
We could jazz it easily, but we wouldn't. Neither
would we jazz the "Tannhauser" march nor any of
the lovely operatic arias. On the other hand, there
would be no sacrilege in jazzing "Dixie/* even
though the tune is deep in the hearts of a Southern
people. And "Song of India," which we did jazz,
was a ballet in the first place, so that was all right.
It is just a matter of feeling. Some things were
written for sober* sublime moments. They should
be left for such moments. They do not fit jazz.
But the "Peer Gynt" suite, the "Poet and Peasant"
overture why not jazz them?

Jazz then is a method. But it's not only a
method of counterpoint and rhythm; it's also a
method of using tones, using the color of sound.
The instruments for making jazz music are, as I
shall point out, legitimate and have been used in

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Jazz

various combinations for making serious music.

I have already spoken of the original meaning
of the word jazz. John Philip Sousa, who with
his military band, by the way, has come nearer the
hearts of the people than any musical institution
America ever has had, says jazz slid into our
vocabulary by way of the vaudeville stage, where at
the end of a performance, all the acts came back on
the stage to give a rousing, boisterous finale called
a "jazzbo." There is also a legend that a particu
larly jazzy darky player, named James Brown and
called "Jas" from the abbreviation of his name, was
the source of the peppy little word that has now
gone all over the world.

At any rate, in spite of its early troubles, many
are now anxious to claim the word, and to my mind,
New Orleans presents perhaps the best evidence.
Maybe some future encyclopedia will settle the
moot question for us. The compilers will have to
build the case on a good deal of supposition, but
once we see it all written down without any "I
suppose' s" and "probably's," we shall be set at ease.

Also, some future chronicler will undoubtedly
answer another popular query: "Is it art? "

122

VI

Islt Art!

VI: Is It Art?

I DON'T really care whether jazz is art or not.
There is always a hubbub going on about art
and I can't see that it gets anywhere. A good part
of the controversy depends upon definition and I
would rather be working to do something than to de
fine it, any day.

Webster says art is "a system of rules or of or
ganized modes of operation serving to facilitate the
performance of certain actions an occupation hav
ing to do with the theory or practice of taste in
the expression of beauty in form, color, sound,
speech or movement."

That is too complicated for me. I think art is
merely the capturing in some form of a bit of uni
versal beauty. Still, let Mr. Webster and any
other man have his opinion just so long as he
doesn't make art out to be snobbishness. Snobbish
worries about art have never done much but annoy
and hinder the real artist.

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Jazz

It is fairly safe to say that those folks who scorn
everything American because being American, it
can't be artistic, and despise everything the common
people like, would have been a good deal the same
in Athens when the Acropolis was being built. As
sure as fate, they'd have been mourning for the
pure art of ancient Crete and talking about the
vulgar commercialism of Greece. It's a way we
mortals have.

The Greek sculptors and musicians and dram
atists weren't talking much about art. They were
too busy working. There was the same difference
between the talkers and the artists that there is
to-day.

To me the test of art is its appeal to great masses
of humanity. The artist must say something that
is intelligible to all the people. He must go so deep
that he touches the basic human. He always has,
if he has been real. It was the people of Athens who
cheered Praxiteles, and the Florentines, the crowds
in the street, whose verdict settled the fate of the
works of Andrea del Sarto and Leonardo da Vinci.

In music, the same thing has happened. All the
masters have suffered heartbreak and discourage-

126

Is // Art?

ment because the cultured few whose judgment was
taken as a criterion refused to countenance anything
new. It was the common people who found beauty
in the fresh forms and insisted upon a hearing for
the artists.

I hope I have not seemed to say that every
thing that is popular is art. I claim no artistic dis
tinction for the teddy bear or the cross word
puzzle. But I do believe that the so-called art
which is reserved for the art-snobbish few goes as
far from the line in one direction as the teddy bear
does in the other.

Beauty is emotion, not intellect and emotion is
universal. Nobody needs a long course of school
ing in order to respond to beauty. The first re
sponse is instinctive, fundamental, out of the depths
of human emotion. And it is only when a work
appeals to the depths of human emotion that it has
any chance to outlive its generation.

Beauty is sometimes found in unbeautiful sub
jects. It is the treatment that counts, not the
theme. If the design is to shock, then that is bad
art. Sometimes jazz deals with unbeautiful themes,

127

Jazz

but the best of it is trying to make something
beautiful out of its material.

Music has never had a chance to reach the multi
tudes in America. Yet they respond to it whenever
they have the opportunity. The masses of the
people of America are fundamentally the same in
artistic appreciation, or the lack of it, as the masses
of the people of Europe. Americans are, after all,
the same blood, with the same age-old cultural
background. And good music is sung and hummed
and whistled from Moscow to Naples, from Cher
bourg to Budapest.

As far as the matter of appreciation is con
cerned, there is no earthly reason why the classics
should not be the daily musical preoccupation of
working men, stock brokers and farmers from New
York to San Francisco. They never have been be
cause there has always been this rigid wall of in
sulation, put up by the highbrows.

Highbrowism was slipped over on us. Our pio
neer grandfathers were too busy keeping alive in
the wilderness to spend any time learning to be
"cultured." The backwoodsmen, the Indian fight
ers, the farmers on the frontier were cut off from all

128

Is It Art?

music except a few simple melodies old English
folk songs and American songs of the same type.
This is very lovely music, but our forefathers didn't
think of it as music because a few rich folks in
the cities had a copyright on the word. They aped
everything European and imported music with their
fashions and their books.

The first attempt to popularize music was the
humble beginning of Tin Pan Alley, New York's
great street of popular song. A corset salesman
who loved music was among the first of the melody
manufacturers. The early efforts were in the main
tawdry and banal. Perhaps you remember "Smoky
Mokes," "A Hot Time in the Old Town," "The
Curse of An Aching Heart."

Even then the pieces that really took hold on the
popular fancy had some flavor of real music. Men
delssohn's "Spring Song" had a mighty fascination
for the man in the street and everybody sang the
melody in popular songs thinly disguised.

The beauty of the original theme caught the ear,
but the crudity of the development proved tiresome,
so that the fashion in songs shifted constantly.
The public felt the same uneasy dissatisfaction that

129

Jazz

it feels with style in clothes, which not being bas
ically beautiful, is constantly changed for some
thing new. At the same time, this banality was
spoiling the ear and debauching the taste.

Then the phonograph companies came along and
began to put out good records. It is to the credit
of the American people that there was a general
response, and instantaneous, to this new musical
opportunity. But nothing in music really took hold
of the whole population until jazz set all America
humming, singing, dancing.

Jazz is not in the "tradition" of music, accord
ing to the old sense, but is not the real tradition
of music one of constant change and new develop
ments? Jazz isthej^ It
catches up the underlying life motif of a continent
and period, molding it into a form which expresses
the fundamental emotion of the people, the place
and time so authentically that it is immediately
recognizable.

At the same time, it evolves new forms, new
colors, new technical methods, just as America con
stantly throws aside old machines for newer and
more efficient ones.

130

Is It Art?

I think it is a mistake to call jazz cheerful. The
optimism of jazz is the optimism of the pessimist
who says, "Let us eat, drink and be merry, for to
morrow we die."

This cheerfulness of despair is deep in America.
Our country is not the childishly jubilant nation
that some people like to think it. Behind the rush
of achievement is a restlessness of dissatisfaction,
a vague nostalgia and yearning for something in
definable, beyond our grasp.

A few discerning critics have heard this in jazz
but they call it a hint of the Russian, or a flavor
of the Oriental. That is because, for some unknown
reason, writers and critics generally talk of the
"soul of Russia" and the "soul of the Orient/*
Apparently nobody ever thinks of crediting Amer/
ica with a soul.

We are supposed to be a nation of crass material
ists. We are supposed to care for nothing but
money. We care probably less for material things,
less for money than any people on earth.

We want something something beautiful, good,
satisfying; and with our tremendous energy we
keep building and destroying and building again, in

131

Jazz

our passionate desire to have it a desire never sat
isfied. That is the thing expressed by that wail,
that longing, that pain, behind all the surface
clamor and rhythm and energy of jazz. The critics
may call it Oriental, call it Russian, call it any
thing they like. It is an expression of the soul of
America and America recognizes it.

Some months ago, Simeon Strunsky, writing in
the New York Times, rebuked the flood of writers
who constantly speak of jazz as the expression of
the American spirit.

"Does it," asked Mr. Strunsky, "express Presi
dent Coolidge, our party system, our Rotary club,
our Puritanism, our capitalism and our Ku Klux
Klan?"

No, jazz does not represent these varying aspects
of America, any more than it represents hot cakes,
corn on the cob, grapefruit and meat for break
fast. What it does represent is the indefinable
thing which will mark the Puritan President Cool
idge, the Irish Tammany ward leader, Harry Sin
clair, Babbitt and Mr. Simeon Strunsky himself,
every one of them, as Americans, in any city of

132

Is It Art?

Europe. It represents the composite essence of
them all.

That essence, if I may be forgiven for taking
the liberty of attempting to describe anything so
elusive, is energetic, wistful, enterprising and self-
confident, above a substratum of humility.

Of course, anybody else who likes may take a fling
at defining Americanism and do it better than L
But whether we can say what it means or not,
Americanism is recognized by us all, and not only
by us, but by every foreign shopkeeper who sees it
coming from afar.

As to whether jazz is or is not art does it mat
ter what we label it, if it lives and brings new
beauty into life*? And if it does not then the
label matters even less.

133

VII

Jazz in America

VII : Jazz in America

HE jazz age has been the subject of pro
found and careful condemnation. I found,
when I went to put together these notes, that while
comparatively little has been written in an analyti
cal way about jazz, as music, the criticisms, con
structive and otherwise, of so-called jazz manners
and morals, would fill a library.

I have kept a jazz clipping file for nearly five years
and whenever I feel blue, I take it out. It is more
enlivening than a vaudeville show. Ministers, club
women, teachers and parents have been seeing in
jazz a menace to the youth of the nation ever since
the word came into general use. They have claimed
that it put the "sin" in "syncopation," They have
scolded at it, satirized it, "suppressed" it. Noth
ing has done any good. /
"Jazz music causes drunkenness," one despatch
quotes Dr. E. Elliott Rawlings of New York as

137

Jazz

saying. "The quick and staccato tempo of jazz
music, with the plaintive and pleading notes of the
violin and the clarinet, the imploring tones of the
saxophone, the rhythmic beating of the drums all
these send a continuous whirl of impressionable
stimulations to the brain, producing thoughts and
imaginations which overpower the will. Reason
and reflection are lost and the actions of the person
are directed by the stronger animal passions. In
other words, jazz affects the brain through the sense
of hearing, giving the same results as whisky or any
other alcoholic drinks taken into the system by way|
of the stomach. It has the same effect as a drug
and one may become addicted to its use."

Wails the president of the Christian and Mis
sionary Alliance Conference: "American girls of
tender age are approaching jungle standards
. . . little American girls are maturing too
quickly under the hectic influence of jazz and
speed."

The next generation, this same missionary goes
on to relate, will see women old in their twenties,
unless the jazz tendency is halted. The jazz spirit
of the times was blamed "by Dr. Harry M. Warren,

138

Jazz in America

president of the Save-a-Life League, in his 1924
report, for many of the fifteen thousand suicides in
the United States.

Nathan Ketelovitch, a musician, was said to have
been driven mad by his hatred for jazz music. He
came from Missouri.

"The jazz band view of life is wrecking the
American home/* declared Professor Herman
Derry, speaking in Detroit, Michigan.

Dr. Florence H. Richards, medical director of
the William Penn High School for Girls, Philadel
phia, based her opposition to jazz on a long and
careful study of the reactions of 3,800 girls to that
kind of music.

"The objection of the physician," she explains,
"is the effect that jazz has on certain human emo
tions. All sorts of excuses may be made for it, but
the consensus of opinion of leading medical and
other scientific authorities is that its influence is as
harmful and degrading to civilized races as it al
ways has been among the savages from whom we
borrowed it. If we permit our boys and girls to be
exposed indefinitely to this pernicious influence, the

139

Jazz

harm that will result may tear to pieces our whole
social fabric/*

More than one American city, instituting music
week, has become divided in its citizenry over the
question of whether jazz shall or shall not be played
in short, whether jazz is or is not, music.

A famous domestic economist rose recently to
remark that jazz is cheating the home since folks
are spending on dances and cafes the money they
might otherwise put into wall paper and saucepans.

A Canadian physician produced statistics to show
that jazz had doubled insanity in the United
States. I sometimes think there are statistics to
prove anything.

A specialist in diseases of the ear and throat
declared that if the epidemic of fc bees knees,"
"Apple Sauces" and "Dadas" continued, a whole
nation would be overwhelmed with ear paralysis.

Because her husband was so fond of the great
American noise that he played "What'll I Do" on
the victrola until 4 A.M. six days a week, an Ohio
wife was granted a divorce. Just about the same
time, Judge Lamberton of Illinois said that three-

140

Jazz in America

fourths of the divorces in his court were caused by
jazz.

An Arkansas man bought up an entire pleasure
resort so that he could ban jazz in the place.
Thomas Edison was quoted as saying that he
usually played jazz records backwards because
they sounded better that way. A poet complained
that jazz was drowning the music of the spheres
that the man who wants to commune with the stars
finds his efforts balked by radio. (Personally, I
never heard a radio in any dewy lane. But then
I'm not a poet.)

A committee on "Sabbath and Family Religion"
found, after careful deliberation, the morale of the
average American family in a state of terrible jazz.

Writing in a contest on the value of music in
the home, a Japanese new to this country put in a
word against the prisoner at the bar when he said :
"Music for use in the home must have natural
sound. If we seek a better home by means of music,
we may find it, except by jazz, which is not in
nature."

In a small Nebraska town, jazz was classed as a
public nuisance. Not far away in Kansas, a deter-

141

Jazz

mined historian found in jazz a new cause for the
fall of the Roman Empire. (My own idea would
be that Rome fell because the Romans had to read
Caesar. In the days when I had to do that, I would
have been equal to razing any town.)

I do not want to seem continually to be defend
ing jazz* I am too conscious of its faults and its
crudities to be its gallant knight, anyway. But I
really do think, in spite of all the talk, that the
effect of jazz on American morals is just nothing
at all.

If flappers flap and jazz jazzes, neither one is
the effect of the other. They are both effects of
the fundamental character of the times. It used to
be the fad to blame the War for everything the
moralists didn't like. Now one berates jazz
that's all. Besides an attack on jazz has a lot of
publicity value.

As a matter of fact, the War merely accelerated
the speed of the movement that was under way in
1913 5 and jazz merely expresses it. It will take a
hundred years or more to get a perspective on what's
the matter, if anything. It took a hundred years
to find out what was the matter with life in the

142

Jazz in America

early nineteenth century and Europe was then hav
ing almost the same kind of turmoil we are having
now, due to the revolutions and wars of the late
eighteenth century.

Everybody thought the world was going to the
dogs. There were crime waves and suicide epi
demics. The Greenwich Villagers and Bohemians
of the time advocated excesses that are unprintable
now, wild as we are supposed to be. Yet the world
didn't go to the dogs and the chances are that it
won't this time.

Certainly, if it does, I for one, shall never hold
jazz responsible. As a matter of fact, why isn't
it a good deal better to express one's self in song
rather than in action? Making unholy yowls with
a saxophone, or even dancing till breakfast time in
a state of exuberant, joyous excitement doesn't
usually have any effect more serious than sending
the jazzer to sleep completely tired out.

Not long ago in the clinical notes of the Ameri
can Mercury ', I found some interesting paragraphs
on music and sin.

"Jazz," wrote Mr. Mencken or Mr. Nathan, "is
not voluptuous at all. Its monotonous rhythms

143

Jazz

and puerile tunes make it a sedative rather than a
stimulant. Jazz, which came in with prohibition,
gets the blame which belongs to its partner. In the
old days when it was uncommon for refined women
to get drunk at dances, it would have been quite
harmless. To-day, even Chopin's Funeral March
would be dangerous."

Then the writer goes on to recall James Hun-
eker's story of the prudent opera mama who refused
to let her daughter sing "Isolde" on the ground
that no woman could ever get through the second
act without forgetting God and adds that there
are piano pieces of Chopin, not to mention Puccini's
"La Boheme," that are a hundred times worse than
"Isolde." The "Salome" and "Elektra" of Richard
Strauss have been prohibited by the police, at one
time or another, in nearly every country of the
world and these instances could be multiplied.

Almost everybody has some theory of what's
wrong with the world. Those who don't blame
jazz because it expresses too much, are blaming
the lingering traces of Puritanism because it re
presses too much. I firmly believe the world will
wag along about as usual, regardless of fa-

144

Jazz in, America

natics and crusaders and all their theories. If I
thought jazz was actually doing any harm, I should
worry most sincerely. The charge of wrecking the
home life, menacing the youth and throwing an
entire nation into criminal ways is not a pleasant
one at any odds, even if one is only supposed to
have helped in the disastrous campaign.

But when the evidence is all in, I think we can
refute the charge. When you eliminate from the
mass of attacks on jazz all those that obviously
came out of some one's desire for notoriety and all
the others like the divorce cases that were writ
ten because some newspaper reporter wanted to jazz
up a dull story, there remains, it seems to me, only
one serious ground for objecting to jazz. That is
the effect the rhythms have on the emotions their
intoxicating effect.

There's no question whatever about it. Jazz
does stir up the whole human being. I believe that
some scientific experiments have been made which
show that listening to jazz increases the heart-beat,
raises the temperature, quickens the respiration,
and makes all the senses more acute, It is quite
true that people get drunk on jazz. Nor is it old

145

Jazz

wine to sip* Rather it is a valiant, strident Martini
to gulp, warming the blood at once and quickening
the senses.

But it is yet to be proved that getting drunk on
jazz does anybody any harm. My own opinion is
that it does everyone good. I'm heartily in favor
of that kind of intoxication.

There's no getting away from the fact that
human beings and all the animals, too will 'get
drunk. It seems as though life needs intoxication
now and then. Needs to be stirred up, quickened,
made breathless and excited. Cats go miles to find
catnip and get drunk on it. Mice get together in
great crowds and run in circles until they're so
dizzy they can't stand up. Elephants in the jungles
will assemble every so often and mill around until
they work themselves into a kind of frenzy. And
every society of human beings known upon this
earth has had intoxicants not only drinks and
drugs of various kinds, but seasons of intoxicating
themselves with song and dance. The lowest sub-
men in the jungles of Africa have these seasons in
common with the ancient Greeks, citizens of the
highest civilization in the modern world. That is

146

Jazz in America

to say, both the savages and Greeks get drunk on
song and dance.

More than that, every human being has some
kind of intoxication. I know there are lots of
worthy men and women who won't believe this for
a minute. Tell them they get drunk and they'll be
horrified. They'll assure you they have never tasted
a drop of intoxicating liquor in their lives and never
expect to. There's nothing they hate more than
Demon Rum.

I don't doubt it. But they're missing the fact
that getting drunk doesn't necessarily have any
thing whatever to do with drinking.

Depend upon it, when you really know them,
you will find they all have some way of intoxicating
themselves some way of stirring up their emotions,
getting excited, living more vividly than normally.
I never knew it to fail. Sometimes they get drunk
on poetry, sometimes on religion, sometimes they get
their release, their frenzy, in the very fury with
which they attack drink as Carrie Nation did.
Sometimes they are militant suffragists, or work-
till-they-drop settlement teachers.

Whatever they are, every human being, from

147

Jazz

the highest to the lowest, from the pulpit to the
gutter, wants this sense of fuller life, this intoxi
cation of body and spirit. And every human being
gets it somehow, sometime.

Now of course, there are scores, maybe hundreds
of ways of getting this intoxication. Some are good
and some are bad. Maybe my use of the word intox
ication in this sense, applying it to the good intoxica
tions as well as to the bad, may offend some good
people- I hope not. My dictionary says that the
word "intoxicate" means to excite to enthusiasm or

madness.

In this sense, then, the ecstasies of the saint, the

fervor of reformers and social workers, the spiritual
experiences that take a human being temporarily
away from the humdrum things of this world, are
all intoxications. The other end of the scale is the
stupor of the drug addict who lies in the gutter dead
to the world, but intensely living in some gorgeous
dream.

Jazz as an intoxicant comes somewhere between
these two extremes, obviously. My own notion is
that it is well on the upper side of the line that

148

Jazz In America

divides good from bad. I firmly believe that jazz,
as an intoxicant, is a tremendous influence for good
in the world.

The super-intoxicant works through rhythm.
Now, I don't know a thing about the fundamental
meanings of rhythm, and I doubt if anybody does.
All I have been able to find written on the subject
seems to me to be merely words a sort of game
of chasing definitions. But I do know that rhythm
is somehow bound up with the very deepest centers
of life. There's rhythm in everything in the sea
sons, in the courses of the stars, in the beating of
the heart, the rise and fall of the diaphragm, in day
and night, waking and sleeping, birth and death.

Maybe this will seem fantastic, but I almost be
lieve that everything wrong disease of the body,
unhappiness in the spirit may be due to a disturb
ance of the natural rhythms. Maybe these intoxi
cations that every living thing needs and gets
somehow are simply a shaking-back into the right
rhythms.

Could it be that the difference between the good
intoxications and the bad is simply this: that the
good intoxications get one back into the right

149

Jazz

rhythms "in tune with the infinite/' as the New
Thought people call it and that the bad intoxica
tions do the same thing temporarily but leave one
more out of tune than before. As, of course, drink
and drugs do.

All this is rather highbrow stuff for a plain ordi
nary man like me who doesn't know anything but
music and not much about that. But these are my
ideas and when we come right down to earth, most
people can check up on them from their own ex
periences. There's hardly a person living who
hasn't known what it was to be blue and out of
sorts and cheered just at the worst moment by a
lively bit of rhythm.

Street crowds are constantly being dragged out
of collective gloom by barrel organs, or outdoor
phonographs or passing bands. Try some time
standing across the street from one of those wheezy,
asthmatic mechanical pianos that play in front of
neighborhood motion picture theaters. Hundreds
of people pass by, absorbed in their own affairs,
looking tired and dispirited. (And if s astonishing
wJbea you see the faces of crowds, feow few of them
look ss if they ever had worn a smile.) But as

Jazz in America

soon as they come within sound of the rhythm,
they begin to seem more lively. Their heads come
up, their feet go more briskly, keeping time, time,
time. Their eyes brighten and their whole aspect
changes. It is almost as if they had penetrated
into another world.

And this effect will last for two or three blocks
beyond the sound of the music. Then the crowd
becomes dull again. But it becomes no duller
than before. There is no reaction, no katzenjammer
after being cheered up by rhythms.

I firmly believe jazz has the power to take people
out of a dull world, to shake them up, to give them
an intoxication of rhythm and movement which
makes them happy, makes them better, makes them
live more intensely. Even the nostalgia, lament
and longing that are in jazz create a form of happi
ness because they express something that lies deep
in the soul.

I believe the ill effects of jazz which are so widely
advertised come not from jazz at all but from other
things that are sometimes combined with jazz. I
don't say that a person who spends all night in a
stuffy, hot, smoke-filled room, probably drinking

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Jazz

bad liquor, won't wake up in the morning with a
headache. He or she will be lucky if the head
ache is the extent of the damage. The fact that
a man has been dancing to the rhythms of a jazz or*
chestra isn't going to save him from nicotine poison
ing or from going crazy on wood alcohol.

Jazz itself is good for what ails most people,
but it isn't a cure-all or patent nostrum. When I
hear people blaming it for all the crime, all the
suicides, all the wrecks of young girlhood as
though these things had never been heard of before
jazz was invented, I am reminded of a story I
once heard about vaccination.

"I don't believe in vaccination," said the fanner,
"my neighbor's little boy was vaccinated in school
and within a week, he was dead. None of my chil
dren will ever be vaccinated not if I know it/*

"Did the little boy die of the vaccination or of
small-pox?" somebody asked.

"Neither. He fell out of a tree and broke his
neck/*

People forget that jazz to-day is a national
music a part of the whole American life which
includes housewives, business men, boys and girls

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Jazz in America

and not by any means confined to the occasional
low dance hall. And they blame it for all the
harm that evil influences do. They might as reason
ably give it credit for all the good that good in
fluences accomplish.

I don't go to the extreme of the latter. But I
do believe and here of course and perhaps not for
the first time in the course of this book I shall be
accused of rank over-partiality; though I am only
giving my honest and thoughtful opinion that
spiritually jazz is saving America from calamity.

Professor Patterson of Columbia University says
somewhere in his studies of rhythm that the music
of contemporary savages taunts us with a lost art.
Modern life, he points out, has inhibited many nor
mal instincts, and the mere fact that our conven
tional dignity forbids us to sway our bodies, to tap
our feet when we hear rhythmic music, has de
prived us of normal outlets for natural impulses.

I will go even farther than that. I believe all
the tendencies of modern living of machine civi
lization are to make crippled, perverted things of
htiman brings. The machines are standardizing
everything. There never was before such an era

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Jazz

of standardization as there is to-day in the United
States. It invades everything, crushing all the
normal impulses of human beings.

At their work, men and women are the victims
of efficiency, the Taylor system, so that humanity
itself is being made into machines. On their way
home, on the streets, in the cars, subways, trains,
humans are transported in masses, like wheat run
through a mill. The tremendous business ma
chines, turning out millions of standard products,
dress us all alike, feed us alike, give us the same
things to read, the same ideas, the same outlook
on life, the same manners, the same slang.

There is increasingly less room for individuality
and humanity revolts against this pressure. Hu
man energies have got to break through it some
where. Human beings aren't machines. They
aren't standardized products, all alike. They can't
stand living in masses, under compulsion; working
all at the same speed in the same kind of offices,
in the same kind of factories, at the same kind of
machines; playing in masses, all packed in the same
grandstands, watching the same professionals play
the same games*

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Jazz in America

Human beings want to run, to dance, to sing,
They want to play and to express themselves in
their play. They've got to do it, or all that
dammed-up energy is going to break loose in some
thing a lot worse than play* The Machine Age is
as bad as the Puritan Age, in that it brings repression.

In America, jazz is at once a revolt and a re
lease. Through it, we get back to a simple, to a
savage, if you like, joy in being alive. While we
are dancing or singing or even listening to jazz, all
the artificial restraints are gone. We are rhythmic,
we are emotional, we are natural. We're really
living living to a pitch that becomes an intoxica
tion. And it's good living. The world seems
brighter, troubles don't weigh so heavily, the nat
ural joy and delight there is in just being alive
comes to the surface. That is a good experience.
After it, one goes back to everyday affairs rid of the
pressure of the suppressed play spirit, refreshed and
ready for work and difficulties.

This, it seems to me, is the great value of jazz
in American life.

Jazz has affected America, however, in a musical
"way, and in many more material senses. It is bulk-

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Jazz

ing increasingly large in economics. There are to
day more than 200,000 men playing it. The
number of jazz arrangers is around 30,000. Thus
two entirely new industries have grown up in less
than ten years.

They are lucrative industries, too. Players in
the best of the modern jazz orchestras have come
straight from the symphonies where they were paid
$30, $40, or at the most $50 and $60 a week. Now
they get $150 up.

Jazz has made fortunes and bought automobiles,
country houses and fur coats for many a player,
composer and publisher. Indirectly it has filled the
pockets of the musicians who are identified with
opera and symphony, for it has interested a greater
part of the population in music.

The accessories of jazz figure conspicuously in
the buying and selling of the nation. In 1924, the
United States spent $600,000,000 for music and
musical instruments, and Tin Pan Alley claims that
eighty per cent, of that amount, or $480,000,000,
was paid out for jazz and jazz-making instruments.

It cost ninety per cent, of the rest of the world
approximately the same sum to get completely

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Jazz in America

jazzed up. The foreign market for American music
in pre-jazz times was poor. Tin Pan Alley not
only had no special selling facilities abroad, but
also Europe wrote most of the world's popular song
hits and America bought them songs like "Rings
on My Fingers" and "Has Anybody Here Seen
Kelly?"

Then jazz of the irresistible appeal came along
and the whole situation was reversed. A repre- *
sentative of the largest music publishing firm in
London, with branches all over the continent, said
in New York the other day that jazz has shot the
formerly stable English ballad market all to pieces.
Nobody wants to sing old-fashioned sentiment any
more. And so jazz takes its place among profitable
American exports.

It is a striking commentary on the possibilities
of jazz-making that so many young college grad
uates are going straight from the classroom to the
jazz orchestra. I do not know the exact figures,
because as yet the colleges are a little embarrassed
about the jazz players they turn out. I know un
officially, however, of one school that has fifteen
future jazzists among its hundred seniors. Another

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Jazz

class of two hundred has twenty-five prospective
jazz leaders and ten men out of two hundred and
ten in a third school have announced that they hope
to join the liveliest art of all.

Musically as I have tried to show, jazz has
helped thousands to a glimpse of the beauty of the
classics. I believe this country will want to see
more of the classics, but the people will never for
get jazz, whether it ever gets to be an art or not.

Another thing jazz has done is to develop the
finest set of brass players the country has even
known. This is admitted even by musicians who
are otherwise prejudiced against the great American
noise.

Jazz has fostered originality among players and
has aroused a whole nation to an interest in music,
opening our eyes and ears wider to the message of
new writers* It is waking the people of America
to a spontaneous interest in all kinds of music,
giving all musicians a larger native audience. Not
because of jazz^ but through it, we are becoming
musically a self-confident people. Won't that
help?

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Tin Pan Alley

VIII: Tin Pan Alley

j[ IN PAN ALLEY was the grade school of
jazz. Nowadays, the little pupil with the
tin dinner pail has passed on to institutions of
higher learning. But for all that, Tin Pan Alley
still claims her and in the main, acts as her guard
ian and caretaker.

Perhaps the Alley has caught a little of the spirit
of uplift, too. At any rate, not so long ago,
prominent song writers sent up an official plaint
for a new name for their stamping ground. They
wanted, they said, a name that would be more dig
nified and express* to some extent, the true ideals
and aspirations of the famous old street.

Like everybody else, I think of the Alley as a
street. As a matter of fact, Tin Pan Alley exists
now only as a tradition. The original alley was
on West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Ave
nues, New York. I am told that it was in 1899

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Jazz

that the publishing firm of Witmark & Sons moved
"way up town" to 51 West 28th Street, the whole
sale florist section, from 13th and Broadway.
Then, Broder & Schlam, publishers from San Fran
cisco, also moved over and were followed in due
time by Chas. K. Harris, Leo Feist and others.

Thus Tin Pan Alley was born and though the
christening was delayed for a while, it came off in
due season under the auspices, I believe, of a
newspaper man who had taken up song writing.

In late years. Tin Pan Alley has scattered.
Music publishers ply their trade all along the
Forties on both sides of Broadway. I do not think,
however, that it is the inaccuracy that troubles song
writers about the name. It is only that well, you
can see for yourself that Tin Pan Alley has certain
intimations of informality not suitable for higher
art.

Just the same, the name will stick and I am glad.
There is a deal of poetry and memory in the phrase
that for more than twenty-five years has served a
useful purpose. Why should it be turned off now,
like an old servant who has outgrown his place?

The Alley is one of my favorite haunts. I can
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Tin P an Alley

well understand that the clatter of hundreds of
pianos above which rise hundreds of voices trying
out new songs is Bedlam to the stranger. To me,
however, and to all the other habitues of the place
these are only the signs of a thriving market. For
perish the day when the pianos are stilled and the
voices otherwise employed! This will mean that
some new-fangled mode of entertainment has been
discovered by those who please the fickle public.
For the present, Tin Pan Alley is the commissary
for America's 8,000,000 phonographs, her 9,000,-
000 hand-played and 800,000 foot-played pianos.
But never let anybody tell you that the Alley is
not business-like. There are as many yards of red
tape wound about the "Mammy" song that finally
reaches you as there are about the automobile pro
duced in any up-to-date factory. Tin Pan Alley is
divided into departments with heads, super and
under, clerks, secretaries, telephone operators and
authors. It takes as many long-drawn-out confer
ences, house messages on blue, yellow, pink and
green sheets of paper to run a song factory as it
does to build a skyscraper. For the Tin Pan Alley
factory generally takes its product straight through

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Jazz

from the first step to the last. The first step is
composition. There is, of course, a chance that you
may write a song which will earn you $25,000,
as George Cohan's "Over There" did for him, but
that chance is exceedingly thin. Do they look at
your manuscript? Yes, usually. That is, if you
have consigned it with special tenderness to their
care, writing in ink, or even better, on the type
writer and on one side of the paper. Also, it is well
to send your offering registered. An official of one
of the largest publishing houses admits that a song
manuscript which comes into his office unregistered
is returned to the sender without an examination.

"I figure," says the publisher, "that if the writer
puts no very high value on his product, I shall not
be able to. Besides, the registered ones keep a large
office force hard at work. And we don't get much
out of it. I can count on the fingers of one hand
the hits that we have been able to draw from the
millions of contributions that come in."

He can give no adequate reason for the outlander
not being able to write acceptable songs. Perhaps
it is because the popular song phrasing changes al-

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Tin Pan Alley

most in a minute. What is hot slang one week has
become stale and almost forgotten by the next.

Still there are occasionally some strange freaks.
Leo Wood, who has made several home runs off his
hits in times past, collected on one that was ten
years old.

In 1914, this composer wrote a song called
"Somebody Stole My Gal/' The song was a flop,
in the technical language of the Alley that is, it
did not sell. It was shelved and Wood forgot
about it, as experimenters in the Alley are likely
to do, having learned that even the smartest of
them will never be able to work out the exact
formula for a hit. Ten years later, a pal around
the shop called, "Hey, Wood, congratulations on
your new hit!"

"What d'ye mean?" asked Wood.

'"Why, your hit 'Somebody Stole My Gal/
Didn't you know you had a hit?"

All excited, Wood began to investigate and
found that sure enough his ancient and completely
unsung effort was now selling like the proverbial
hot cakes. At first, he was completely puzzled.
Then he found out that the song was being plugged

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Jazz

by former students of the University of Pennsyl
vania who had liked it and played it in their school
orchestra when it was first brought out. One of the
men became an orchestra leader and others were
interested in professional or amateur musical or
ganizations throughout the United States. They
played "Somebody Stole My Gal" until they made
a hit of it.

"That's What God Made Mothers For" also got
to be a hit ten years after it was written. In the
interim, it gained popularity in England and was
brought back to New York as a song suitable for
Mothers' Day. Now it makes a lot of money for
its publisher and author.

George Cohan has a little song in which he tells
you exactly how to compose a popular hit. First,
you make up a little rhyme and then put it to music
on the piano. After that, you take it to the pub
lisher and he puts it in all the shop windows for
everybody to buy. Naturally, then, you have, says
George, a hit. Just as easy, he adds, as falling
off a log. It does sound simple, doesn't it? And
he makes it work.

Most popular music is written on assignment.
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Tin Pan Alley

That is, the head of the sales department, the pro
fessional manager, or one of the arrangers decides
that it is time to have a certain kind of song. He
takes the matter up with the proper heads of de
partments and if everybody agrees, the particular
tunesinith who specializes in that variety of work is
told to get busy. The staff usually contains ex
perts in mammy, mama, and mother songs, if you
get the distinction. And that is another reason why
the outsider fails to land. He doesn't know about
these vogues. This is, as has frequently been said,
an age of specialization.

I am told that generally the professional man
ager, the head of the sales department and one of
the arrangers, form a jury to accept or reject songs.
They get more practice in rejecting than accepting.
But when occasionally they accept and the lyrics
have been fitted with music, or the tune with lyrics
as the case may happen to be, the real work of
jputting out a popular song begins.

The first step is engraving the plates by hand.
This is delicate work. It is said there are only fifty
men in the country capable of doing it. Just
imagine what the effect would be if the stem of a

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Jazz

note were to be broken off or if a half note were to
be filled in by accident, making it appear to be a
quarter. That is why sheet music is not printed
but lithographed. Millions of copies can be run
off in this way and often millions are. The first of
these are the copyright copies which must be for
warded to the Library of Congress. Professional
copies, prepared for the artists who will plug the
songs, come next. Then there are vocal orchestra
tions prepared in several different keys. Small
motion picture theaters throughout the country use
art slides with the chorus surrounded by a flary
border to be flashed on the screen after the soloist
has sung the verse and the audience is being be
sought to join in on the chorus.

In this day of many orchestras, the orchestrations
for bands, jazz and non-jazz are almost as im
portant as the song plugger himself. And the song
plugger has always been the chief voice of the
Alley. It is his job to sing loudly and convincingly
into whatever ears he can reach. He goes every
where he can break in to motion picture houses,
benefits, picnics, races, circuses and social gather
ings. He really needs to be an adventurous soul

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Tin Pan Alley

and one who takes rebuffs lightly. Every day in a
New York vaudeville theater, two song pluggers
climb up several hundred feet among the pipes of
an organ and sing almost from the ceiling to a
puzzled audience who try to figure where the music
is coming from.

While plugging is important* the publishers con
tended recently that there can be too much of any
good thing. The "too much" in this case was radio.
So the publishers and composers sued the radio
people to compel them to pay a royalty every time
a popular song is sung over the radio. Their ar
gument was that if John Smith tunes in every
night on a red hot mama song, he may soon begin
to wish never to hear that particular song again.
And this, say the publishers and composers* will
undoubtedly hurt the sale of the piece of sheet
music.

The type of plugging which takes a song all over
the country is done by the various vocal artists.
These men and women get their songs from the
professional offices, and comedians like Al Jolson
and Fanny Brice can "make" almost any number,
Nearly always after a number is sensationally pop*

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Jazz

olar, a story gets out about starving youths who
have sold their inspiration for the price of a meal
and continued to starve while the publisher de
posits new millions from its sale and fails even to
send flowers when the defrauded youths at last
expire of malnutrition. I suppose there have been
instances almost as sad as this, but what with the
sophistication gained from the movies, which re
veals practically everybody as a potential villain
and the radio, which broadcasts not only news about
profitable investments but also the etiquette for
any occasion, I doubt if there are many dupes left
in the world. Most of those who write popular
songs demand an advance of something like a thou
sand dollars. The usual author's royalty on the
song is about two cents on each copy of sheet music.
The mechanical royalties arising from phonograph
and piano roll records are usually protected in the
contract.

One of the most pathetic figures along Broadway
is the "one-song man." He is the person who has
created a single hit and has never been able to pull
it off again but neglects everything else in the vain
hope that some day he may repeat. You will find

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Tin Pan Alley

his type in almost every line of creative work. I
know one man who wrote a short story that won
two prizes and the praise of Rudyard Kipling.
That man is now an embittered, discouraged fanner
in the Middle West. He is a one-story man.

Sometimes, song writers bob up in strange places*
Phil Kornheiser, genius hit-picker for the flourishing
Feist Publishing concern, was astonished one day to
get a manuscript from his chauffeur and to find,
moreover, that it was good. Elevator boys, truck
drivers, and society buds are others who have sprung
surprises on him from time to time.

Jazz, the latest phase of American popular music,
is the hardest of all to write, the tunesmiths say.
The lyrics, however, are easier. Previous to 1897
every song had to have six or seven verses and each
verse had eight or ten lines. Now there are two
verses of a scant four lines each, and even at that,
the second verse counts scarcely at all. The whole
story must be told in the first verse and chorus and
usually there is very little to it anyway, the music
being what matters.

In the old days, it took six months to spread even
the most sure-fire song over the United States, for

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Jazz

there was no radio and the orchestras were few and
far between. To-day, the provinces beat New York
to almost everything. Not many of the old-time
song writers, the men who produced the ballads
and coon songs of another era, have been able to
break themselves in to the new vogue. They are
too verbose.

Somebody recently lent me an old volume of pre-
Tin Pan Alley songs, some dating as far back as
1835.

Among the ballad writers of the Forties was Dr.
J. K, Mitchell, the plot of whose 'Tve Waited
Long" was, he said, taken from life.

"In composing a song/' he explained in a fore
word to his publishers, "I always fall into a strain,
which, according to accident, is original or recol
lected. The one I now send you is a simple, origi
nal air, which, on account of the singularity of its
source, may please some of your subscribers of that
sex whose virtues, so often witnessed in my profes
sional pursuits, I take pleasure in holding up to
imitation.

"Sitting up one gloomy winter night with a poor
gentleman who returned, after a long absence, to

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Tin Pan Alley

finish his sickly remainder of life in an impoverished
home, I heard the tale of early love, long deferred
hope and disastrous fortunes, which I have told
with more than poetic truth in the simple verses
now sent to you. The good being who waited, wel
comed and watched, has faithfully performed her
promise, and he whom she loved in absence and unto
death, has departed to a happier world, blessing
with his last accents the angel hand of tireless and
disinterested affection."

The verse of this, which directions say is to be
played tenderly and with much feeling, runs :

"I've waited long, but not in vain,

Though youth and health are gone;
And days of sorrow, nights of pain,

Have found me still alone,
I've waited long for thee,

And now thou comest back to me,
With sorrow on thy furrow'd brow,

A wreck from fortune's sea."

The second verse is even more touching:

"But welcome still, thou broken one,

Tho* nothing's left of thee,
But that fair name and thrilling tone,

So dear of yore to me.

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Jazz

Tho* gone the flush of love's young day,

Its calmer light will come,
To shed a purer, softer ray,

On sorrow's stainless home/'

There is also a "Song of the Tee-Totaller" writ
ten by Rev. Geo. W. Bethune, D. D., and running
like this, animate:

"Let others praise the ruby bright

In the red wine's sparkling glow,
But dear to me is the diamond light

Of the fountain's clear flow;
The feet of earthly men have trod

The juice from the bleeding vine,
But the stream comes pure from the
hand of God

To fill this cup of mine."

After every verse, the treble, alto, tenor and bass
alternately sing as solos and finally in chorus the
following:

"Then give me the cup of cold water!
The clear, sweet cup of cold water;
For his arm is strong tho' his toil be long,
Who drinks but the clear, cold water,
Who drinks but the clear, cold water."

Interesting also is the lisping comic song entitled
**Wery Pekoolier," as sung by Mr. H. Russell and
composed by <L Blewitt. There are five verses of

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Tin Pan Alley

this and each verse has eleven lines. The refrain
goes thus :

"Wery perkoolier! tho* from that day to thith I have

never
Theen or thpoken to her, but thomehow I can't help

thinking
Her behavior to me, it was wery perkoolier ! ! !"

"The Charming Woman," an "admired song,"
written by Mrs. Price Blackwood, recites the
charms of a certain Miss Myrtle who could read
both Latin and Greek and was said to have solved
a problem in Euclid before she could speak, but
Mrs. Blackwood, who evidently belonged to the old
school, deplored the fact that Miss Myrtle had
never been taught to hem and to sew, also that
she was "a little too thin" (it seemed that it was
possible to be too thin, then) and her dresses were
"nearly up to her knees." The moral which Mrs.
Blackwood draws is that no sensible man will ever
marry a charming woman.

The transformation in American music of which
jazz is the upshot started nearly twenty-five years
ago. Following the era of the popular ballad and
coon song, ten years later came ragtime.

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Jazz

The best way I have found to differentiate be
tween ragtime, blues and jazz is to indicate each
by a line. The ragtime line is jerky. Blues has a
long, easy line and the jazz line rises to a point.
"The Maple Leaf" was the first rag. "Memphis
Blues" was the first blues, so far as I have been
able to find. The first was by Scott Joplin, the
second by J. C. Handy. At least these were
the earliest compositions that America called by the
names of "ragtime" and "blues." Yet syncopation
and rhythm which were the distinguishing marks
of the ragtime were not really new. And when you
added counterpoint and harmony to the melody and
rhythm of ragtime, you got blues, essentially a trick
of harmony. But the blues were not new, either.
Can anybody who has ever heard it forget the dis
tant shore in the opening of "Tristan and Isolde"
which shimmers in a blue haze that one can feel?

At first both ragtime and blues were a sort of
piano trick passed on from one performer to an
other. Up to the time that Handy organized an
orchestra in Memphis, it is doubtful whether a

single blue measure had ever been put on paper.

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Tin Pan Alley

Handy wrote out the "blue" notes for the first
time*

According to John Stark, publisher of ragtime
in St. Louis, ragtime originally meant a negro syn
copated dance, and the real negro blues were never
intended as a dance at all, but were a sort of negro
opera, more like a wail or a lament than anything
else. Big sessions of blues were held in the South
among the colored people, the biggest of all at
c liouse rent stomps" when a negro found himself
unable to pay his rent. The "stomp" consisted
of a barbecue with music afterwards, during and
before. The guests raised a purse to save their
host's home and also composed a new blues for the
occasion.

A high mark in popular musical history was "The
Magic Melody" of Jerome Kern in 1915, This
piece introduced a modulation which brought new
harmonic richness and variety into American pop
ular music where only stereotyped rhythms and
melodies had been before. Mr. Kern was a real
pioneer, for folks called the "Magic Melody" high
brow terrible indictment in those days if you were
earning your living writing music.

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Jazz

Times and events have, of course, colored the
evolution of both serious and popular music.
Period songs mark the activities of a people. The
pioneers and settlers sang hymns and folk songs.
The Civil War brought a partisan type of song and
the ballads of the Spanish-American wartime
painted a country emotionally stirred, singing
"There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To
night" and "Break the News to Mother."

Jazz, which is ragtime and blues, combined with
a certain orchestral polyphony which neither had,
was still another way of letting off steam. At first,
it was mainly rhythm running wild, tempos collid
ing with tempos. It is interesting to note that
the earliest jazz was found uncopyrightable by
certain judges. Interesting indeed are the reflections
of Judge Carpenter in the District Court of Northern
Illinois, Eastern Division, on October 14, 1917, in
the case of LaRocca against E. Graham. A piece
called '"Barnyard Blues" and another called "Livery
Stable Blues," which decidedly resembled each
other, were involved in this copyright dispute.

Said the Judge: "This is a question of each
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Tin Pan Alley

one claiming the right to this musical production.
No claim is made by either side for the barnyard
calls that are interpolated in the score, no claim is
made for the harmony, the only claim seems to be
for the melody. Now, as a matter of fact, the only
value of this so-called musical production is the in
terpolated animal calls. These so-called animal
sounds are not in question, are not claimed under
the copyright. The only question is, whose brain
conceived the idea of the melody that runs through
the so-called 'Livery Stable Blues/ I am inclined
to take the view of Professor White that this is
an old negro melody which witness said he heard
fifteen years ago. I think with Professor White
that neither Mr. LaRocca nor Mr. Nunez conceived
the idea of this melody. This band was a strolling
band of players, none of them, according to the
testimony, with a technical knowledge of music.

"This, of course, is not an essential to the pro
duction of pleasing or entertaining music. Take
the Hungarian Strollers, with their wonderful music
which has come down to us. They were untrained
musicians in a technical way. So with this band.
With a quick ear and a retentive memory, they hear,

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Jazz

remember and reproduce, and perhaps no living man
could determine where that melody came from.
What they produced was a result that pleased their
patrons and it was the variations of the original
music that accomplished the result, not the original
music,

"I defy any living human being to listen to that
production played upon the phonograph and dis
cover any music in it, but there is a wonderful
rhythm which in case you're a dancer and young,
will set your feet moving/'

So ended the first jazz controversy, also the first
decision in regard to pilfered music* But the dis
cussion was to be renewed. Which brings us to a
catch question are you bored by classical music?
Does the very word "classical" make you nervous
because it sounds so highbrowish? And do you, by
chance, declare that jazz is the only kind of music
you can possibly understand?

If the answer to all these questions is yes, the
joke is really on you. For the truth is that, when
you are listening to your favorite jazz tune, you
are most likely absorbing strains that are most
classic of all the classics. Do you not know that

180

Tin Pan Alley

more than half the modern art of composing a
popular song comes in knowing what to steal and
how to adapt it also, that at least nine-tenths of
modern jazz music is turned out by Tin Pan Alley is
frankly stolen from the masters?

That's why a good many of the jazzists chuckle
over lowbrows who say they can't abide classical
music and highbrows who squirm when they hear
jazz. Pretty nearly everybody knows now that
Handel's Messiah furnished the main theme of the
well-known "Yes, We Have No Bananas/* Per
haps it is not such general knowledge that most of
the '"banana" song which wasn't taken from the
Messiah came from Balfe's famous "I Dreamt That
I Dwelt in Marble Halls/' Chopin supplied "Alice
Blue Gown/' "Avalon" was Tosca straight.

Chopin came into the limelight again with "I'm
Always Chasing Rainbows," taken from the beau
tiful "Fantasie Impromptu Opus 66." The same
master furnished the theme for "Irene." "If I
Can't Get the One I Want" can be traced to Bach,
if you are good at tracing things. "Marcheta" is
reminiscent of the "Merry Wives of Windsor."
came from "The Blue Danube Waltz."
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Jazz

"Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining" more than sug
gests a Paderewski Minuet. "The Love Nest" is
Tschaikowsky. "Russian Rose" is a frank adapta
tion of the r *Volga Boat Song." Equally frank is
the popular version of the "Song of India."

There is no legal limit to this kind of lifting, so
long as the model chosen has not been copyrighted,
and even then a few strategic notes changed by an
expert can make everything quite safe. As to the
moral aspects of the theft, there aren't any. There
are, naturally, morals among musicians, but they
aren't concerned with this question. All the music
of the world is a kind of common storehouse, and
Kipling expresses the musician's attitude toward it.

Not long ago, the heirs of a composer brought
suit against a certain publishing house to recover
damages for this kind of thieving. The publish
ing house produced in court the music to prove that
the composer had himself taken his themes from the
folk songs of several European countries. The
composer's heirs lost their suit. The folk songs had
never been copyrighted and were perfectly legiti
mate material for the composer but also for the
jazz musician*

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Tin Pan Alley

It has never been a scandal in the musical world
that the greatest composers of every period bor
rowed freely from each other. There is a nice little
story told of Wagner and Liszt. They were listen
ing together to one of Wagner's earliest rehearsals,
when Wagner said, "Now you will hear something
from your St. Elizabeth."

"Oh, well," replied Liszt, "then it will at least
be heard."

There's a Handel story, too, that the composers
of the "Banana" song ought to know. A friend
pointed out to Handel that he had used the therne
of a rival in his own works.

"Have I?" murmured Handel, carelessly. "It
was much too good for him, anyway. He never
knew what to do with it."

There is no question but that Handel knew what
to do with the theme that was later to be jazzed
into "Yes, We Have No Bananas." But Handel
himself would no doubt have enjoyed the song that
proved that the jazz musician knew what to do
with it, too, in his own way.

This common use of muscial themes is so general
that a hundred instances of it leap into the mind.

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Jazz

At random I may mention Tschaikowsky's use of
the Marseillaise in his "1812 Overture" and Schu
bert's use of it In "The Two Grenadiers," the
"Star Spangled Banner" in Puccini's "Madame
Butterfly," Beethoven's borrowing of the "British
Grenadier" in his "Septet Opus 20," and "The
Campbells Are Coming" that romps gaily in Volk-
man's "Richard III Overture."

Still, even Congress has recently been stirred up
about these customary predatory practices of
composers. This was when Alfred E. Smith, rep
resenting the Music Industries of Commerce, ap
peared before the House Committee on Patents in
Washington to oppose the measure in the new copy
right bill which was intended to give every composer
exclusive financial rights to his theme.

Why should they need protection, Mr. Smith
wanted to know, when they themselves had always
taken whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted
it, wherever it was?

I suppose there will always be somebody dashing
into courts of law to claim damages from some mu
sician who is blithely following the usual custom
of stealing good things here and there. An enter-

Tin P an Alley

taining suit was that brought by a choir leader of
Spokane, Wash., who wanted damages from an or
chestra leader, on a general charge of syncopating
the classics. The choir leader claimed that he
suffered acute anguish because his artistic sensi
bilities were harrowed although I don't know why
he needed to listen to the orchestra and that he
sustained also a serious financial loss because chil
dren were having their musical taste perverted and
no longer wanted real musical education.

As a matter of fact, even when an irate protector
of the masters does get action to suppress certain
music, it does him very little good. The reason for
this is that music bootleggers have arisen who for
a price will furnish the coveted orchestration to
any leader who applies. The bootleg orchestration
headquarters are rather like the ancient blind tigers
of local option days. That is, they masquerade as
pants-pressing establishments, junk shops or even,
in extreme cases, the neighborhood drugstore
which also supplies music to its patrons.

Well, bootleg or not, the jazz classical com
bination is really cultivating a taste for classical

music.

185

Jazz

At first glance this may seem strange. But it is
true; and also it is natural enough. People grow
familiar with the themes in jazz, their interest in
music is stimulated by their love of jazz, and the
natural next step is to follow the themes back to
ward their original sources. The original sources
of musical themes are so far back in folk-song that
it would probably be a lifetime job to trace only
one. But just behind the jazz use of them is classi
cal music.

Now, most Americans for many reasons that
I have already given have been afraid of classi
cal music. They were too humble; they thought
they couldn't understand it. So they didn't try.
They avoided classical music, and more or less
scoffed at it. But when they come to it by way
of jazz, they find it isn't so difficult to like it, and
they do. They may not know all the highbrow
musical jargon which is, after all, only a tech
nical vocabulary, just as a mechanic's special vocab
ulary is technical but they do know what they like.
And after all, music is written to be appreciated by
the people, not to be argued about by critics.
This trend toward getting acquainted with classi-
186

Tin Pan Alley

cal music is a good thing. I should like to see
every jazz record in every home in America accom
panied by the record of the classical music from
which the jazz theme was taken. I am all for it.
The real lover of music likes jazz the better for
knowing all music, just as he likes all music the
better for knowing jazz. When I play a jazz ver
sion of "The Song of India," for instance, and
learn that the effect of the sale of my record has
been to increase the sales of the original record fifty
per cent., I am delighted. The same thing hap
pened after "Russian Rose" was put on the market;
the public clamored for the beautiful record of
"The Volga Boat Song." Instances of this kind
are multiplying every day.

So it is no theory of mine that jazz is making
America into a truly musical nation. There are
facts and figures everywhere to prove it. The
strange thing is the spectacle of the patrons of music
in America, who for years have been keeping good
music barely alive in this country by artificial stim
ulation, by maintaining splendid orchestras that
had to be subsidized by the rich, while they
lamented the lack of a musical public in this coun-

187

Jazz

try. One would think they would rejoice, to see
music rising like a wave and engulfing America, to
see people music-mad. But a great many of them
don't. Some of them raise their hands in horror,
and say that jazz is vulgar. Well, it is, in the good
old Latin sense of the word. It is vulgar; that is,
it is the possession of the common people. As fast
as sheet music can be printed, and phonograph
records turned out, and little orchestras organized
everywhere, classical music is becoming the posses
sion of the American public, too. One thought that
was what these music patrons wanted, all the time.
But when every Tom, Dick and Harry takes to
humming operas in this country, as Italian peasants
do, will these lofty ones call the operas vulgar?

They should, to be consistent. But it's a strange
world. Consistency may be a jewel; but most
people would rather wear diamonds, even so.

188

IX

Tricks of the Trade

IX : Tricks of the Trade

/ NVARIABLY, the layman is amused to dis
cover that the saxophone and the banjo, both
regarded by him as essentials to jazz, were not in
cluded in the original jazz band at all. As a matter
of fact, the saxophone, which was invented more
than seventy-five years ago by Antoine Sax; was
designed as a very serious instrument. It was
heard of tener in church than anywhere else and the
story goes that Mendelssohn refused to allow it in
his orchestra because it was too mournful I

The banjo is said to have been invented by a
negro plantation hand from a cheese box. At any
rate, it Is strictly American and there are foreign
instrument makers to-day, as well as perhaps some
here at home who would consider that it is un
worthy to be called a musical instrument if only
there were not such a great demand for it.

The original jazz band consisted of a piano, a

191

Jazz

trombone, a cornet, a clarinet and a drum. The
fundamental harmony and rhythm were supplied
by the piano, the player of which could usually
read notes. The other performers had no notes, so
it mattered not at all that they had never learned
to read music. They simply filled in the harmonic
parts and counter melodies by ear, interpolating
whatever stunts in the way of gurgles, brays,
squeals and yells occurred to them, holding up
the entire tune, though still keeping in the rhythm.

The clarinetist devoted himself to the shrill
upper notes of his instrument while the trombone
and cornet were muted at will, or according to the
ingenuity of their manipulator.

The drummer, meantime, would take shame to
himself if at any one time he was working less than
a dozen noisy devices.

Those days are gone forever or nearly so. Con
sidered musically, the ideal orchestra is one which
will contain a quartette of every kind of legitimate
orchestral instrument, thus permitting a four-part
Harmony in every quality of musical tone. Al
though this does not prove entirely practical, it is
still an ideal which every orchestra leader tcnday

192

Tricks of ike Trade

sets for himself. The result, I will venture to say,
is that the United States has a greater number
of efficient economical, small orchestras than has
ever been known anywhere.

The jazz orchestra of to-day differs from the
symphony mainly in that the foundation of the
symphony is its strings. All other instruments are
added for tone color. In the jazz orchestra, the
saxophone has been developed to take the place of
the cello. In fact, it has been developed to such a
high degree that it can be used for the foundation
of the entire orchestra, taking the place of second
violins, violas and cellos. The brasses then are used
for contrast.

The wood winds, as the clarinet, form the basis
of the military band. The jazz band then may be
said to come somewhere in between the symphony
and the military. We have computed that one
baritone saxophone is equal in sonorousness to a
section of nine or ten cellos; that one alto saxo
phone equals sixteen first violins or twelve seconds;
that one tenor saxophone equals eight violas. That
is why, with twenty-five men, including only eight
first violinists and four saxophones we have been

193

Jazz

able to get the volume of an eighty piece symphony
orchestra. At least Leopold Godowsky, famous
pianist, has declared we have approximately that
volume.

The saxophone, then, is, in a way, king of the
jazz orchestra. Because of this, such demands have
been made upon the saxophone player that the
manufacturers of the instrument have had to de
velop it to meet the new needs. It was a very dif
ferent product twenty, or even ten years ago, from
what it is now. As a matter of fact, all instru
ments have been perfected in much the same way
that is, a demand for better tone quality and a more
perfect scale has sprung up and the manufacturer
'has had to comply with the new specifications.

Some demon statistician has estimated that there
are now 10,000,000 saxophone players in the
world. The estimate probably falls far short of
the reality. And those amateur music makers who
are not playing the saxophone have taken to the
banjo. They say some good genius always arises
to meet any national need. Is it any wonder that
the sound-proof apartment is now a glorious
reality?

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Tricks of the Trade

Musicians recognize four general classes of in
struments in speaking of the orchestra strings,
wood winds, brasses, and the battery of traps, made
up chiefly of instruments of percussion.

The legitimate strings include the. violin, the
viola, the violincello and the double bass. To this
may be added a few such instruments as the viol
da gamba and the viol d'amore. Other strings
stand in a musical sense midway between these and
the instruments of percussion. These other strings
include the piano, cymbalon, harp and a vast num
ber of the mandolin, banjo, guitar and ukelele fam
ily. Of these, my orchestra has eight first violins,
two pianos, a banjo and a cymbalon.

Wood wind instruments include, first of all the
flute, which has many forms such as the piccolo or
octave-flute, the bass flute, the Hungarian and
Chinese flutes, the fife, the flageolet or tin whistle,
and half the pipes of the ordinary pipe organ.
Among the wood winds are the oboe family which
takes in all instruments having a double reed
the oboe itself, the musette, the oboe d'amore, the
cor anglaise or English horn, the heckelphone or
baritone oboe, and the bassoon or contrabassoon.

195

Jazz

The sarrusophone, which is made in seven or
more sizes, is named with the wood winds although
it is metal. For this reason, it is sometimes mis
takenly called a metal oboe. The clarinet family,
which includes all the single reed wood wind in
struments, has the clarinet in various keys, the bas-
sett horn, the bass clarinet, the heckelcarind and
similar instruments, besides the saxophones in all
keys, which, like the sarrusophone are made of
metal. The Highland bagpipe belongs to both the
single and double reed classes. Among the reeds
should also be put the reed or cabinet organ, some
times called a harmonium, the accordion, the mouth
organ or harmonica, and many of the pipes of the
pipe organ.

Of the wood winds, my orchestra has four saxo
phones that is, four saxophone players, but all of
these play saxophones in various keys clarinet,
oboe, English horn, heckelphone, octavon, accor
dion and piccolo.

Brasses include the trumpet, the cornet in its
various forms, the trombone, either valved with
a simple slide or with a complicated combination of
slides and valves, the French horn, which in sym-

196

Tricks of the Trade

phony is classed with the wood wind instruments;
the alto and tenor horns; the baritone horn, or
euphonium; the tuba and contra-bass tuba; the
Bayreuth-tuba; the contra-bass horn; the bugle; the
coach horn; the saxhorn or keyed bugle, made in
seven or more sizes, and a number of others. Of
the brasses, we have the trumpets, trombones,
French horns and tubas.

The battery of an orchestra includes so many in
struments that if one were to try to name them
all, the list would stretch from here into infinity.
.The truth is, almost anything capable of making
sound may be introduced into the battery for
special effects. Thus, if one wants thunder and
lightning, rain, hail, pistol shots, cuckoo calls, the
cackling of a chicken, or the crying of a baby, one
relies upon the traps player to produce it. Perhaps
the most important instruments of the battery are
the tympani or kettle drums, the side or snare
drums, the bass drum, the tambourine, the triangle,
cymbals, tom-tom, Chinese drum, castenets, rattle,
glockenspiel and celesta, xylophone, marimba and
bones. Of these, we have the celesta, two tympani,

197

Jazz

snare and bass drum and dozens of fixings for our
special effects.

It is rather hard to classify the performers in
any jazz orchestra, for the reason that most of the
players perform on many different instruments.
Thus with twenty-five players, we have more than
forty instruments. Doubling is, then, the main
strength of the jazz orchestra, making it possible to
get the maximum of volume and color with the
minimum of men.

For -convenience, I shall summarize the instru
ments of my orchestra: eight first violins, two
pianos, one banjo, a cymbalon, a celesta, two B-flat
trumpets, two trombones, two French horns, two
tubas, two tympani, snare and bass drum, all the
traps, an oboe, an English horn, a heckelphone,
four saxophones in B-flat soprano, E-flat alto,
B-flat tenor, E-flat baritone; clarinets B-flat base,
E-flat alto, B-flat alto, E-flat baritone, B-flat
tenor; octavon; piccolo; accordion and flute.

The four saxophone players double on all the
single and double reed instruments. The second
pianist doubles on the celesta. One of my clarinet
players not only plays the clarinet in all keys, but

198

Tricks of the Trade

doubles also on the oboe, the piccolo and the flute.
The string bass player doubles on the tuba, one
violin player doubles on the accordion and Fve seen
one man in the course of an evening play as many
as twelve instruments, including three saxophones,
three clarinets, the oboe, the octavon, the heckel-
phone, the xylophone and bagpipes.

So far, this seems to me a fairly satisfactory
concert jazz orchestra. We are always trying out
new instruments and discarding old ones, so that
I don't feel we shall ever be satisfied to grow static.
For a dance orchestra, eight violins are an unneces
sary number of strings. Also, one of the pianos
may be omitted and an extra banjo added. At one
time, I tried out the organ for a dance orchestra,
but found it too heavy and overpowering for the
kind of music we make. Another instrument we
have used is the harp which gives a pleasant effect
in certain pieces, but is not useful enough to make
it worth having in the average small orchestra. In
the double reeds, I am planning to add a bassoon.

Jazz players have become so adept at handling
their instruments that they nearly make each do
the work of two. The tricks of the trade rapidly

199

Jazz

become public property, especially if they are put
on the records. Thus the discoveries go East and
West, North and South, to enrich orchestras in re
mote spots. Many jazz conductors and arrangers
can adapt an orchestration from hearing a record
played. I have heard some of our arrangements
which bands had obtained in that way and they
were well played, too. Such adaptation needs,
however, a good musical ear and considerable tech
nical knowledge. I am told that when a record is
made by certain Eastern orchestras, arrangers of
orchestras in the West and Middle West gather for
the first playing with paper and pencil.

The various stunts with mutes, while pretty well
known to those in the business, are important
enough to speak of in some detail. The chief kinds
of mutes are made of metal and cardboard. Before
clever manufacturers saw the possibilities of these
bits of material, the players themselves were using
ingenious contrivances to get the same effects.

The first time I ever heard what I call the wawa
mutes, used with the cornet, was, I think, when we
did "Cut Yourself a Piece of Cake." The players

200

Tricks of the Trade

got that effect by inverting glass tumblers over the
bells of the instruments.

Did you ever see a kazoo? Of course you must
have a small worthless-looking piece of tin. A
kazoo stuck into a mute will give a buzzy sound
that comes handy in certain pieces.

In spite of the new appliances, hats, preferably
derbies, are still used for mutes. When hung over
the instrument, these give a French horn effect
that is, fuller quality and softer tone. A soft hat,
having no resonant power, is no good for this pur
pose. The humble tin can is useful to give a big,
open, and rather harsh tone. The aluminum or
copper mute gives a sweeter tone and the pressed
paper or cardboard mute is softer than any of the
metal, but rather sharp in tone. A kazoo in the
end of a cardboard mute gives an effect almost like
an oboe. A cup-shaped brass mute gives a shallow
tone with a thin quality. The flutter tongue in the
brasses is rather like a covey of quail flying out
from ambush.

One of our trombonists has a special mute such
as I have never seen before, by which he gets a
beautiful graduation of sound very like the voice

201

Jazz

of a sweet human baritone singer. In the case of
most cup-shaped mutes, the air goes in and comes
out the same way, but with this one, the air goes
from one chamber into another and out. This
player makes his vibrato with his lower lip. This
takes, of course, a well-trained lower lip, and prac
tice combined with natural aptitude is the only
recipe I know to recommend.

Horn players can sharpen their instruments a
whole or half tone by using their hands. This
again has to be worked out by practice into a
technique all a player's own.

The glissando is one of the chief embellishments
of jazz. This is simply a sliding together of the
chromatic scale. That is, instead of fingering the
scale, the player slurs the tones together rapidly.
Performers with brasses and reeds, especially if the
reeds are flexible, get a weird effect and add to the
rhythm by this trick. A glissando on the clarinet
at the opening of the "Rhapsody in Blue" has at
tracted a great deal of attention. This trick takes
a lip that is well trained. Again, practice, and I
might say, a naturally obedient set of muscles, will
do the job. The wawa effect on reeds can be gotten

202

Tricks of the Trade

simply by blowing Into the mouthpiece. Slap
tonguing is accomplished by sucking on the reed,
thus creating a vacuum, then hitting the vacuum
with the tongue, causing a pop.

Jazz makes frequent use of the staccato on the
violin by playing near the frog of the bow. The
violins also do glissando in double stops. The
kazoo effect, by the way, was priginal with us and
we tried to disguise it for a while but were soon
found out. The jazz band is always busy with
new tricks. The drummer used to have to originate
most of the sounds. Now every man in the or
chestra tries to outdo him. Some of the effects de
pend upon very small things. Indeed, a tiny mute
gives a neater sound than a large mute which is
what we call rather "sloppy."

One interesting device used with the trombone I
must mention. This is achieved by holding the bell
of the instrument to the small end of a phonograph
horn, with a result that has almost the qualities of
a baritone voice. The saxophone, to my way of
thinking, can come the nearest of any instrument to
reproducing the human masculine voice. The
clarinets are equally adept in trained hands of

203

Jazz

simulating the feminine voice. Both brass and
wood winds can produce laughter that is uncannily
realistic.

Some trick stuff is all right and some is in the
very worst possible taste. For instance, a man who
wires a mouth organ to his face as a solo instrument
and uses the piano to accompany himself is making
himself ridiculous. If your trick stuff is clever, use
it. If not, keep away.

One of the qualities in the musician that the jazz
orchestra has developed is ingenuity. If he feels
that he needs a certain sound from his instrument,
he puts his hand or his foot in it or goes and gets
a beer bottle, if nothing else is at hand.

The orthodox have, I think, been pretty well
shocked by the employment of curious devices for
altering the tonal quality of certain ancient and
respected instruments. Somebody has suggested
that this is because the mechanism is often rather
baldly exposed. With the new mutes, perhaps, this
will eventually be improved. As a matter of fact,
not nearly all the jazz stunts are new. For in
stance, the derby mute of the clarinet goes back to
1832 when Hector Berlioz directed the clarinetist

204

Tricks of the Trade

at a certain passage in his "Lelio ou le Retour a
la Vie/' to wrap the instrument in a leather bag to
"give the sound of the clarinet an accent as vague
and remote as possible."

The glissando of the trombone occurs in the or
chestral score of Schoenberg's "Pelleas et Meli-
sande," written in 1902 when jazz was as yet
entirely unknown. Schoenberg is also the father of
the flutter on the trombone that is, very rapid
tonguing on the same note. And Stravinsky, in the
days when jazz was still in its infancy, used muted
trumpets.

Yet jazz has developed much that is new and
this is its chief service to music. Music, like every
thing else, gets static in its development during any
period when fresh tools are not being devised.
From the way in which some of the jazz devices
have been received, one might think that it was lese
majesty to make a pleasing sound in any way in
which it had not been made before. Yet the de
velopment of music has gone hand in hand with the
development of new instruments from the day

when the first savage found that hitting a hollow

205

Jazz

log with a club made a sound that stirred human
emotions.

There is a story somewhere to the effect that the
man who first strung a board with catgut and made
sounds upon it was put to death because his fellow
men resented the introduction of a new noise into a
world which they regarded as already overstocked
with sounds. So you see, there have always been
cranks and reformers.

The jazz band has introduced some little-known
instruments such as the heckelphone, the slide cor
net and the czimbalon. It has developed such new
ones as the sarrusophone. And, of course, the banjo
has received so much attention that it would hardly
be surprising to hear of it being taken into the
symphony. The now notorious saxophone, in Vl-
most any of its sizes and keys, is one of the most
useful of modern instruments. It is easy to learn
I believe there is a tradition that an ambitious
boy can get the hang of it in twenty minutes but
difficult to master. But other instruments are still
more difficult to master, and what is more, it is
not necessary to master the saxophone to play dance
music.

206

JEANNE GORDON, OF THE METROPOLITAN OPERA, CROWNING
THE KING OF JAZZ

Tricks of the Trade

Saxophones supply the element of humor which
American dancers insist upon having and they are
also extremely flexible so that more or less difficult
running passages may be played with ease. In
skilled hands, then, the saxophone is capable of
smooth intonation in solo passages, though like all
reeds, the control of pitch is not easy.

With two or three saxophones for the same
player, one may obtain a large variety of tone ef
fects, shifting a melody into the deep bass with
good effect, and then by picking up a smaller in
strument, obtaining a cold blue tone almost as pure
as that of the flute. Or, as they do in England, one
may take the little top sax, and push it up to super-
acute register- to make extremely funny noises.

The collective compass of the soprano, alto,
tenor and baritone saxophones is a little more than
four octaves, so there is sufficient territory for the
complete performance of many pieces without the
use of any other instruments.

As the basis for a three-piece orchestra, the saxo
phone is thoroughly successful. One combination
possible is the saxophone, xylophone and piano.
Offhand, one might think there would be too- much

207

Jazz

percussion and too little melody, but a baritone
saxophone is beautifully set off by the sparkle of
the xylophone and the piano holds together the
rhythm.

Strictly speaking, there are no more three-piece
orchestras. In a modern orchestra, two men often
play a dozen instruments and three men, provided
they are equipped with the right number of instru
ments, can turn themselves into a huge working
force.

The best one-man dance orchestra is and always
has been the piano. Nine-tenths of the music in
the civilized world has been written for this old
stand-by and practically all arrangeable music has
been arranged for it. And the best piano orchestra
is the piano alone !

The banjo, going on to the next typical instru
ment, is the instrument of highest importance in
our type of orchestra. Its tone is clear, snappy, and
it carries farther even than that of the piano. It
is capable of rhythmic and harmonic effects that
a leader is put to it to find in any other instrument.

You can get more pizzicato effects, you can get
relatively greater volume with a single banjo than

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Tricks of the Trade

you can with a whole symphony load of pizzicato
violins and violas and you can play passages they
wouldn't dare to attempt. There is an example in
a piece we used to be fond of playing, "On the Sip,
Sip, Sippy Shore," where "Turkey in the Straw"
is introduced as a banjo solo. The pace is furious
and the swift and flexible hands of the artist must
move fast indeed. What symphony conductor
would dare put such a passage as this in the hands
of his pizzicato strings? Yet the single instru
ment, in the dance orchestra, with one set of fingers,
is all that is required.

In the ensemble, the banjo may be considered
even more important than as a solo instrument. If
the banjo is a good timekeeper, it will tone down
the piano, stop the traps from banging and cause
the whole organization, no matter how many in
struments there are, to move on the beat like one
man.

Obviously, the jazz band has tried to develop
extreme sounds. The deepest, the most piercing
and the softest effects are produced but any jazz
orchestra leader will soon learn that he gets his
best effects if he plays softly. It is not necessary to

209

Jazz

bang to get your effect or to burst the instrument
for volume. On the contrary, a good jazz or
chestra is at its best and most seductive when at
its quietest.

The tubists give the bass notes an effective soft
definiteness while the muted brasses and high-
pitched saxophones and clarinets provide the ex
citement and color.

The early jazz was each man for himself and
devil take the harmony. The demoniac energy, the
fantastic riot of accents and the humorous moods
have all had to be toned down. I hope that in
toning down we shall not, as some critics have pre
dicted, take the life out of our music, I do not
believe we shall. It seems to me that we have re
tained enough of the humor, rhythmic eccentricity,
and pleasant informality to leave us still jazzing.
And while we do not have so much unrestricted in
dividualism as in the old days, every man must still
be a virtuoso.

A critic has said that if jazz is to rise to the
level of musical art, it must overthrow the govern
ment of the bass drum and the banjo and must
permit itself to make excursion into the regions of

210

Tricks of the Trade

elastic rhythms. Perhaps that is true. All I know
is that if somebody will write us a different kind
of music, we shall be glad to try to play it. So
far the jazz orchestra is the only typically Amer
ican arrangement of instruments that has ever been
made. The brass band has been done in this coun
try very well, but not with original instrumenta
tion. Never before has the combination of
saxophone, brass, banjo, piano, drums and little
strings been tried.

As I have tried to indicate, the modern jazz
orchestra is an efficient arrangement. Every mem
ber knows exactly what he is to play every minute
of the time. Even the smears are indicated in the
music. Rehearsals are as thorough and frequent as
in any symphony. The discipline of the orchestra,
if it is a good one, must be complete. Yet there
must be freedom such as I have never seen in any
symphony. The men must get joy out of their
work. They must have a good time and try to give
their audience one.

Music is human. The character of the man that
handles the instrument shows in his music just as
his character shows in his handwriting. Every

211

Jazz

human being has his own value, his own character.
It is when this variety is released into music that
music strives and grows, Jazz has forever ended
the time when music was to the average American
a series of black and white notes on white paper,
to be learned by rote and played according to di
rection in a foreign language staccato, legato,
crescendo.

Jazz has taught Americans that they may take
any old thing that will make a sound that pleases
them and please themselves by expressing with it
their own moods and characters in their own
rhythms, thus making music. The saxophone, in
spite of the fact that at one time it was used for
church music, comes romping into the orchestra like
a wild Westerner into Boston society. Even the
tin pan is not to be despised just because it was
made originally to hold milk. Says jazz, put an
old hat over a trumpet and make it sing as it never
sang before. Who cares that it is only an old hat.

It was, after all, some very distinguished persons
who started putting base agencies to work when
they needed them. Schubert used to amuse his
friends by wrapping tissue paper around a comb

212

Tricks of the Trade

and singing the "Erlking" through it, and Tschai-
kowsky required the same implement to get his
effects in the "Dance of the Mirlitons." The
highly respected orchestras of the seventies em
ployed cannon that broke all the crockery for miles
around when they wished to get the effect of a
battle*

Also, the jew's-harp a century ago was regarded
as a highbrow instrument, Eulenstein playing six*
teen at once before the King of England and get-*
ting a decoration for it. To be sure, the musician's
teeth broke off one by one before he ended his
career, the last with such a clatter that he was lit
erally thrown out of court. But that's no argument
against America making a joyful noise with what
ever she has nearest at hand !

213

X

Orchestration

X: Orchestration

cr

I HE secret of the success of modern dance
music is in its arrangement. For unless the
music is cleverly scored, the greatest musicians can
not make it popular with the public.

Any man who is planning a career as a musician
ought to know how to transpose at sight. Every
score that comes to me is analyzed and dissected at
rehearsal, down to the very last note. Naturally,
the small orchestra arrangement will not always fit,
so I take the music apart phrase by phrase and find
just where each melody lies according to the possi
bility of each instrument.

Did you ever stop to consider that a single note
on some trap instrument will carry away with it as
much memory as thirty bars of senseless pounding?

Jazz orchestrations have done more to change
the character of the jazz orchestra than anything

else. The distribution of the music has been made

217

Jazz

definite, a balance has been kept between the choirs.
The arranger distributes the parts to his orchestra
and here all his knowledge and wit are demanded.
Mr. Grofe considers the orchestra a sort of quar
tette, ranging from soprano to bass. In the sep
arate Instrumental groups, he also divides the parts
from high to low. If you give the highest voice
and the lowest to the saxophone and the middle
voices to the brass, you will get a singularly rich
effect of having three or four times more than the
saxophones you are using. If you give the high
voice and the low to the brass and fill in the middle
with the saxophone, you will get the opposite
effect.

Perhaps it would be interesting to show what
actually happens to a simple melody when made
ready for the use of a jazz orchestra. Suppose we
take the popular song, "Oh, Katharina." The or-
chestrator in this case, the talented Frank Barry,
decided to put in German atmosphere, therefore
starts with a little "Ach Du Lieber Augustine/' The
first verse is left fairly straight and the first chorus
is done in the regular American manner so as to
"set" the tune.

218

Orchestration

Then comes a half chorus in jazz. After that
starts some counterpoint with a German tune. The
saxophones are changed to the oboe and clarinets
playing the melody while the tuba plays "In Tiefen
Keller," the famous German drinking song. The
brass and saxophones then play the melody staccato
while the violins play the "Soldier's Farewell," a
German folk song.

The piece now softens down to muted brasses
playing the melody while the solo clarinet plays
"Hi Lee Hi Lo" for a half chorus, then with
trumpet fanfare modulates into "Oh Tannenbaum"
while the violins and saxophones try to make them
selves heard with the melody. A half chorus of hot
jazz and then the strains of "Ach, Du Lieber
Augustine" bring the orchestration to a close.

The main point in such orchestration is that after
the tune is set the instrumentation shall be changed
for each half chorus. In between, the keys are
shifted, with a four to eight bar interlude to get
into the new key. The new demand is for change
and novelty. Four years ago, a whole chorus could
be run through with but one rhythmic idea. Now

219

Jazz

there must be at least two rhythmic ideas and some
times more,

On the other hand, it is necessary to avoid over
crowding with material, for the melody must not
be lost. "Noodles," that is, fancy figures in saxo
phone such as triple trills, often crowd out the mel
ody, and the point to remember is that everything
else is secondary to keeping this alive.

220

XI
On Wax

XI: On Wax

l/y HEIST our first records came down from the
laboratories of the Victor Company for
their initial "audition/* a visitor exploded, "What
the dickens?"

Then he listened to a* few bars he was an ex
perienced listener and demanded: "Who is it?"
The one step was dying a natural death and in
that death was becoming apotheosized into the
fox trot. But our first record was different from
either. Perhaps dancers in America who are old
enough will remember it. It was a twelve-inch
disc, the first I think of the dance variety ever made
that size, and there was a one step on one side of
it arranged from the "Dance of the Hours." On
the other, was the legally immortalized "Avalon"
which gave occupation for a time to the copyright
lawyers of two continents under the theory that it
had been plagiarized from "La Tosca." This was

223

Jazz

one of the greatest fox trots of the late "glide"
period.

The companion record was that masterpiece
of dance composition "The Japanese Sandman,"
ranking with the earlier "Havanola," which Ru
dolph Gans had had scored by the composer and
played by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra as an
example of American music. The even more popu
lar ''Whispering'* was on the other side.

For years before we began to record, it had been
necessary for almost all recording laboratories to
change the instrumentation of nearly all orchestral
pieces. Certain instruments, notably the double
basses, which were then used, the horn, the tym-
pani, and in lesser degree, other instruments, failed
to yield satisfactory results. The double basses
frequently were discarded and replaced by a single
tuba. Modifications also in the placing of the or
chestra were necessary in order to make the volume
of tone from a large number of instruments con
verge upon a tiny diaphragm whose vibrating needle
inscribed, upon a disc of wax, the mysterious
grooves, which, retraced by a second needle at-

224

On Wax

tached to a second diaphragm, gave back the
voices and accents of music.

So for all our labor and study, we had to go
into the recording room and learn all over. One
of the changes we made when we found that or
dinary drums could not be put on the record was to
use the banjo as a tune drum. The tympani and
snare drum record, but the regular drum creates a
muddy and fuzzed-up effect when other music is
going, although solo drums make very good rec
ords. It was at this time that I tried out the banjo
for the ground rhythm and discovered the possibil
ities of that small instrument which until then had
been kept in the back and hardly heard at all. We
also discovered that almost every instrument has
a treacherous or bad note and that when the
score calls for that note the instrument had better
stop playing. An extreme dissonance would mean
that the record would be blasted. For all our
troubles, however, we were told that fewer changes
had to be made in our scoring than in any dance
records of the time. As a rule we made two records
at a time, though once I believe we made nine in
three days. Each record averages about an hour

225

Jazz

and a half or two hours, for there must first be a
rehearsal and a test before the perfect record is
passed upon by the company "hearing committee/'

Recording is perhaps the most difficult task in
the day's work or the lifetime's. A slip may pass
unnoticed in concert, whether across the footlights
or over the radio, and even if noticed, it may be
forgiven, since living flesh and sensitive will can
not always achieve mechanical perfection. But a
slip in a record after a time becomes the most
audible thing in it. Everything else will be neg
lected to wait for the slip and to call the attention
of some one else uninstructed in music to a great
artist's false note. So every composition has to
be recorded until it is perfect. If things go fine
from the first, well and good; but if, from the three
records of each number usually made, there is none
which will quite pass the exacting standards of the
committee, there must be another afternoon of
making and remaking. Every faculty of the artist,
emotional as well as physical, must be expended in
producing a perfect result.

In late recording practice, with highly improved
methods of capturing sound and with new scientific

226

On Wax

principles, it has grown more and more practicable
to record large bodies of instruments without losing
volume, without having a large quantity of tone
dilute and diffuse itself before reaching the actual
path of the recording apparatus.

In the laboratory, as we worked, the possibilities
of the orchestra began to loom large and the orig
inal plan with a single player for each type of
instrument began to expand. The saxophone, for
instance, had always had a shadow or understudy.
A third saxophone now was added and in time the
orchestra developed the full Wagnerian quartette
of instruments in this group. The one trumpet was
reinforced by a second and the now popular com
bination "straight" and "comedy" trumpets came
into existence. The banjo instead of just marking
time began to make new excursions into the realms
of rhythm and the fox trot began to change with
out, however, disturbing the pedestrian order of
things.

Not all these changes took place, of course, in
the laboratory. Most of the rehearsing and dis
cussing and rescoring was done in consultations
outside consultations not always free of the heat

227

Jazz

of argument. The actual business of recording is
a star chamber matter but it is no violation of a
secret to admit that some of our early records were
spoiled by men swearing softly at themselves be
fore they learned the new adroitness which the
delicate mechanism of the recording room required.

The records of our orchestra that I have liked
particularly are fox trots like the "Song of India,"
with its burst of two part harmony, the "Waters
of the Minnetonka," with its wood wind accom-
paniniental figure and its swinging climax and the
insidiously delicate "Oh, Joseph."

One sees all one's friends and some of one's ene
mies at the recording laboratories and the exchange
of experience between the classicist and "coon-
shouter," the string quartette and the clarinet jazz
band is illuminating for everybody.

Not long ago, Rosa Ponselle, Mischa Elman and
I were all recording at the Victor, though in dif
ferent laboratories. We had lunch together and
regardless of the fact that the temperature was
above 90, the great dramatic soprano demonstrated
a dance step for us in the best Broadway style.
Then we sat for our pictures, she in her bungalow

228

On Wax

apron, Elman minus collar and coat and I in plus
four knickerbockers.

It interested me that the singer should have been
familiar with the current fox trot step, for with the
almost weekly changes in the dance I had begun to
believe that only orchestra leaders and college boys
could possibly keep pace. We have even to antici
pate the change and that has become our chief
problem as the public is well aware. Dancers and
musicians, as a rule, are harder to bring together than
the various labor unions working on a big build
ing. Ballroom dancers persistently refuse to con
form to accepted or classical styles, or to any styles
which they do not determine for themselves in the
ballrooms of the hour. Any study of the long list
of our fox trots will reveal peculiarities in tempo,
rhythm and general style not to be accounted for
on the basis of "individual variation," or the time-
honored principle that "nature makes no two faces
alike"; the simple truth of the matter is, that a
dance, almost, is no sooner in the hands of the
public than the style changes.

During the past half-dozen years there have been
several powerfully marked variations in the ordi-

229

Jazz

nary, or "two-step" fox trot. The original "glide
two-step" fox trot of the "Japanese Sandman"
period soon was succeeded by the "radio roll" or
the "scandal walk" (the two passed into one an
other) by the "blues," which was officially earlier
but in point of fact later in the experience of many
dancers than the "collegiate," which set up an
entirely new style of dancing and called for an en
tirely new type of music. The "tango fox trot"
prevailed in a few cities, the "military fox trot,"
and entirely local dances with fanciful, and in some
cases meaningless, names, in others.

All of these changes of style or local and in
dividual caprices in taste, have to be ministered
to by a dance organization as large as ours, or we
soon perish. Few new dances, except those for
stage use, are ever brought forward by teachers;
they are developed, in public, by persons of no
particular skill, and with little or no knowledge of
the dance as an art. It is avowed, and on excellent
authority, that the "collegiate" sprang from the use
of rubber-soled summer footwear and slow, sticky
dance floors at public resorts, where the skate-like
slides and pivots of the old-style dancer were im-

230

n Wax

possible. With footwear of this sort it was possible
to do little else than stamp up and down. From
this developed a polka-like dance with crude hops
and jumps, calling for agility, but with no great
degree of sophisticated grace.

Small items like this determine the whole power
of survival of an orchestra. When a method crys
tallizes or a dance is standardized, it is done. For
the younger generation everywhere who invented it,
without half knowing most of the time what they
were about, are now through with it.

One phenomenon I noted when I was playing
dance music at the Palais Royal on Broadway. A
fox trot was played in a rhythm exactly that of the
Habanera or Tango, but much swifter in time.
The result was that the easy "chasse" skips pe
culiar to this type of dance became impossible to
the dancers who thereby changed their rhythm from
that of the tango to the easier two-step with the
result that six hundred fox-trotters not all of
whom could be charged with profound musical
knowledge automatically were dancing in cross
rhythm.

231

XII
Jazz Makers

XII: Jazz Makers

f HAVE a friend and you probably know
somebody just like him who, when it's time
for the salad at dinner, immediately rolls up his
sleeves and wades merrily into the job of shaking
reluctant oil and vinegar into friendly combination
whilst tobasco, paprika and other favorite condi
ments wait their turn on the sidelines. The process
of mixing salad dressing as done by Jim always re-
^minds me of making a jazz band.

The ingredients* have to be just so everything
cold, the oil perfectly fresh, the vinegar not too
tart and yet tart enough. But the real art comes in
putting in just enough of everything and not the
bit too much that will turn the mixture sour or oily
or peppery.

So it is with a jazts orchestra. There must be
no staleness, no luke-wannness, no over or under
seasoning. It is not so easy to mix either a good

235

Jazz

dressing or a good jazz band. Conventional
measurements are of no use for the goal is individu
ality yet not an odious individuality such as comes
with a dressing too spicy for the common palate
or an orchestra where there are so many stars that
the blend is not rich and smooth.

The first essential of any good orchestra is mu
sicians of the very first water. But with a jazz or
chestra, this is not nearly enough. Jazz players
must be masters, not merely of one, but several in
struments, so that a small group can produce the
tone and color of a far larger one by doubling on
two, three or half a dozen instruments.

Jazz players have to possess not merely musical
knowledge and talent but musical intelligence as
well. In a symphony, the conductor is the per
sonality which stands out. In a jazz orchestra,
every man is more or less in the limelight. There
fore each man must be clever enough to sell him
self to the audience in other words, he must be
a good showman.

He must have initiative, imagination and inven
tiveness amounting almost to genius. In the sym
phony, the composer invents. With us, that job

236

Jazz Makers

falls to the player. This versatile individual must
be young enough that the spirit of adventure is still
in him. He must be temperamental enough to feel
and not too temperamental to be governed. Neat
ness in dress and a cheerful expression are impor
tant assets and a sense of humor is practically
indispensable. A jazz player must be inherently
optimistic. He will never get over in our business
if he pulls a long, solemn face. It is better to be
overly irresponsible than overly serious-minded if
a man takes up jazz-making for a living.

Perhaps the most important item in the jazz
equipment is that each player shall be American.
It is better to be a native-born American and better
still, if one's parents were born here, for then one
has had the American environment for two gen
erations and that helps a great deal in playing jazz.
At least, the musician must be a naturalized citizen,
which means a considerable residence and a knowl
edge of language and customs.

My men are of every kind of ancestry Italian,
German, French, English, Scandinavian. That
does not matter. Nor does their religion, of which
there are almost as many varieties as there are men.

237

Jazz

What does matter is that they are all American
citizens and nearly all native-born. Most of them
are married. I prefer them so, not that married
men are better jazzers, especially, but they are more
conscientious and stick to their jobs with greater
persistence.

I got a good many of my twenty-five men from
symphonies. One of these is Walter Bell who
plays the bass and contra-bassoon. He played in
the San Francisco symphony and has written two
or three symphonies himself. He got his start
playing the mandolin and guitar in an ice cream
parlor where the mice and rats were so thick that
he had to keep his feet up on a table to prevent the
pests gnawing the leather of his shoes.

It was through him that I really got to know
and like jazz and I picked him for my own or
chestra (mentally and provisionally, of course,
because in those days I was lucky to have a job)
at a performance of the Symphony in San Fran
cisco. Bell was regularly playing bass but the
bassoon got sick and I being the youngest member
of the orchestra, was chased off to bring his instru
ment down for Bell to play. '

238

Jazz Makers

He played it, and beautifully, but right in the
midst of the 6th Tschaikowsky Symphony, he
commenced to play in all off-rhythms jazz really.
I don't know why he did it just a crazy impulse,
I suppose, to shock the staid symphony and curios
ity to see how his experiment would sound or hear
how it would sound, rather. Nobody paid much
attention except myself and I felt like applauding,
it was so well done.

Another man who came to us from a symphony
is Chester Hazlett, also of the San Francisco group.
He was a first clarinet at seventeen in a symphony,
but he plays the saxophone for us because that's
the instrument he likes best.

Frank Siegrist, trumpeter, and I played together
in the Navy and experienced together some of the
difficulties of trying to supply eight orchestras to
as many company commanders when we only had
the makings of four. But discipline was discipline
in the Navy and nothing was impossible (that's a
Navy slogan), so we always made up the eight
orchestras out of something.

It was of Siegrist that Alfred Hertz, conductor
of the San Francisco Symphony, said: "I don't be-

239

Jazz

lieve there is another lip like that trumpeter's any
where in the world! What I wouldn't give if I
could have a man like that! But of course you,
with all the money you make, can afford to pay him
more than a symphony ever could !"

"Well," said I, for I couldn't resist the oppor
tunity to rub it in a little, "y u might have had
this man, for he tried out for you no less than four
times before I got him and you turned him down
every time! 3 *

Mr. Hertz is one of the many real musicians who
have changed their sentiment about jazz. When he
first heard me jazz a classic (it was the "Peer Gynt"
suite) he was frantic. He said he hoped I'd have
to "sleep on snakes, snails and worms" to pay me
out for the sacrilege, but when we went to San
Francisco the last time, he called his orchestra to
gether and introduced me with a flattering speech.

Henry Busse, also a trumpeter, is another sym
phony man. He has played in a number of the high-
class musical organizations of Germany and knows
the classics thoroughly. Yet it was he who stuck
a kazoo in a regular mute one day (he got the kazoo
from a ten-cent store across the street) and got an

240

Jazz Makers

Oriental quality like an oboe that I had been want
ing for a long time.

Men taken from symphonies are the easiest to
train. They have had good discipline and they
usually leave the symphony because they are in
terested in jazz and want to experiment along a
new line. Their knowledge of music is valuable
and they know their instruments. The real blues
player is more hidebound in his way than the sym
phony man. Blues become almost a religion and
the man who worships them thinks nobody who
can really play them is ever able to read music.

I had a New Orleans boy, Gus Miller, who was
wonderful on the clarinet and saxophone, but he
couldn't read a line of music. I tried to teach him,
but he wouldn't try to learn, so I had to play
everything over for him and let him get it by
ear. I couldn't understand why he was so lazy or
stubborn or both. He said he was neither.

"It's like this," he confided one day. "I knew
a boy once down in N'Awleens that was a hot
player, but he learned to read music and then he
couldn't play jazz any more. I don't want to be
like that."

241

Jazz

A little later, Gus came to say he was quitting. I
was sorry and asked what was the matter. He
stalled around a while and then burst out:

"Nuh, Suh, I jes* can't play that "pretty music'
that you all play. And you fellers can't never play
blues worth a damn !"

I have paid a good jazz player as much as
$30,000 a year and none of the good ones get less
than $200 a week. Many get $250 and $300.
This is good pay, but then a well-trained, well-
advertised jazz orchestra demands good money and
gets it.

I choose my men according to the character
istics I have already set down and I find them
everywhere. Many of them come to me for try-
outs. We have forty or fifty applications for jobs
every day in the New York office. My friends,
too, scout around for me and, naturally, I hear
every orchestra I can, everywhere I go. I catalogue
the likely players and some day when I have a
vacancy, I reach for the person who seems likely to
fill the place. I always have plenty of names on
file, for the music business is just like any other.
A doctor will recommend a doctor in another town

242

Jazz Makers

to you if you are moving away from his section
and music men recommend cornetists and saxo
phonists in the same way.

Our rehearsals are free for alls. Every man is
allowed to give his ideas, if he has any, about how
new pieces should be played. The orchestra makes
a kind of game of working out effects that will go.
In shirt sleeves, if it's hot, and in bathing suits if
it's hotter, with sandwiches and cold drinks handy,
weVe been known to forget quitting time by sev
eral hours.

When we are about to do a new piece, Grofe, my
arranger, and I spend several hours discussing it
from every point. Then, if we are in a hurry for it,
he takes two days to arrange it, working often night
and day. Sometimes he keeps right on for three or
four days without any sleep. The initial rehearsal
requires only about thirty-five or forty minutes,
owing to Grofe's skill and the ease with which the
boys pick up new numbers. That is, after forty
minutes* practice, we are ready to play a new piece
one that has the typical jazz effects of mutes and
special parts.

There is very little prima donna stuff in my or-

243

Jazz

chestra, in spite of the proficiency of each man. We
all work together for what we are trying to do.
Star stuff can spoil any group. Cooperation can
make even a mediocre band go great. If any one
of the boys gets an inspiration, we stop and try it
out. Some of the suggestions prove, when tried, to
be no good, but Yd far rather have enthusiastic
youth and a few mistakes in my orchestra than
seasoned, too careful old stagers. The appeal of
the jazz orchestra comes from spontaneity rather
than from finished, brainy work. And for spon
taneity, one needs wholesale youth.

The men are as enthusiastic over a new method
or a new instrument as I am. When a queer-shaped
contraption that somebody has dug up is brpught
in, everybody crowds around and wants to try it.
The boys are always experimenting with fresh com
binations, hoping to nose out a new bit of business.
I wouldn't have a stolid man in my orchestra. The
audience would feel a lack instantly. I think I'd
fire a man quicker any day for a show of really surly
disposition than for a serious mistake in musical
execution.

Not but what my boys may lose their tempers
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Jazz Makers

occasionally if they find it necessary. A fit of tem-
perishness once in a while is natural enough and
comes with temperament. Perhaps I shall be criti
cized for allowing temperament on my list. I be
lieve, however, that all who do creative work are
blessed or cursed with temperament. It seems to
be a way nature provides for balancing excessive
strain. Of course it can be carried to rather extraor
dinary extremes*

A musical comedy star I know invariably kicks
and screams when she comes off the stage after an
evening's work. But at other times she is a very
good-humored little person. Once in Denver, a
hotel waiter told me that he had spent most of the
morning offering eggs to De Pachmann, the musi
cian. It seemed, he wanted two eggs that matched
and he sent back nearly a dozen pairs before he
got two yolks that were exactly the same shade.

Sometimes what looks like temperament is merely
self-preservation. Many singers, notably Jeritza
and the late Caruso, have made a practice of speak
ing to no one for several hours before singing. The
audience benefits here.

An audience, by the way, can raise a performer
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Jazz

to the seventh heaven or dash him down to hell. I
never have faced an intentionally unkind one,
but sometimes I have been greatly depressed by
coldness and stand-offishness. An audience expects
so much. People look at you, not as if you are a
human being, but just as if you are something built
up for their entertainment. They will never excuse
a mistake and they make no allowances for your
off-days,

The players don't glare or laugh when the audi
ence applauds in the wrong place, but the audience
will laugh at a mistake or even hiss. Perhaps if
they understood the handicaps actors and musicians
often overcome at a performance they would be
more charitable. The other day, I saw a dancer
at a vaudeville house fall in a heap in the wings
after her turn on the stage. An old sprain had
suddenly become painful again while she was doing
a difficult whirl at the very beginning of her act,
but she kept a smile on her face and went on
dancing. She got a few hand claps and, very likely,
some former fan of hers turned to his wife and re
marked "Well, too bad> that one's getting old and
stiff."

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Jazz Makers

A thing I could never understand is how any
actor or musician gets the swelled head. God gives
talent and those who get it deserve very little
credit for it. The applause doesn't last long,
either, and then what have we to console our old
age with if we are just a mass of conceit?

Do you suppose Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor
know how they got to be comedians? Or George
Cohan how he became the favorite personality of
the stage? Hard work, you say? Well, partly.
Good luck? Maybe, a little. But mostly, it's just
God-given talent, something to accept humbly and
use the best you can.

A lot of folks wonder what a conductor is for,
anyway. I've read pieces written by critics who
speculated upon how much better certain orches
tras would sound if they weren't handicapped by
leaders. Well, it may sound a little immodest
to say that an orchestra can't do without a leader,
bu.t I do say it. I wish the critics could hear a
really leaderless orchestra. Only, of course, such
a thing is not possible, for if the conductor were
not there, some natural born leader would rise from
the ranks to guide the rest to safety.

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Jazz

A band is like an army. It must have a com
mander. A good conductor must be a real musician.
He should be able to play at least one instrument
well and should understand the intricacies and
possibilities of all the others he employs. He
must be a judge of men tactful, democratic, and
yet able to make his authority felt. He has to be
a good showman and likable. If he isn't sham
ming, it won't hurt for him to be a little eccentric.

As for the ease of jazz conducting did you ever
stand on a space two and a half by two and a half
for just one hour? Try it sometime. There have
been plenty of days when I've had to do that al
most twelve hours at a stretch without any rest.

Here used to be a typical day of mine : Get up
at 9 A.M. snatch a bite of breakfast, get to the
office by 10. Attack correspondence, attend to de
tails of my orchestra business (I handle a whole
string of orchestras that play in New York and
other cities). At 12, a rehearsal or phonograph
take. At 2, play at the Palace Theater. At 3,
another rehearsal or recording session. At 8:30,
play the Palace again and after that play the Palais
Royal until 3 A.M. The rest of the time I slept.

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Jazz Makers

And mind you, this didn't include the necessary
activities for publicity purposes, the people who
come bringing letters of introduction or wanting
you to hear them play or asking for aid with some
charity. And the benefits mustn't forget them. I
have played as many as fifty-nine of these in
twenty-six weeks. And yet a writer who is also one
of my best friends said one day that I have a cinch
of a job "just standing before an orchestra and
patting my foot indifferently well !"

The radio, especially when it first came in, also
added to my labors. I played "The Star-Spangled
Banner" the first time the national anthem was ever
sent through the air. To do it, I had to race madly
from the Palais Royal to the radio station. It was
Sunday and at the station a minister was making
a speech.

They hadn't the system so well organized then
as they have it now and apparently nobody had the
nerve to tell him he was running over his time.
I began to pace the floor, for I had to be back at
the Palais Royal at six. But there was no sign
the speaker was ever going to stop.

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Jazz

Finally the announcer, an agreeable young blond
<iiap, took matters into his own hands.

'That's all right, I can fix him," he vowed.
"Just let him talk on."

He rushed away, did something intricate to a
few connections, cut the poor minister off the air
entirely, put the orchestra in front of another micro
phone and we played. Then we rushed back to the
Palais Royal and picked up the minister, still
talking.

I have had lots of interesting adventures in the
air. Once I gave my mother a birthday party, I
in New York, she in Denver listening in at a radio
set I had sent her. Another time, my little son
sent aerial birthday greetings to me, and one night,
at Station WOR in Newark, we played the latest
New York jazz hits at three o'clock in the morning
for the Prince of Wales, who was listening in at
Brook House, London.

A jazz maker is sure of adventure and usually
he likes it. Unless, of course, it crowds in too rap
idly when he hasn't had more than two or three
hours of sleep the night before!

250

XIII
One-night Jazz Stands

XIII : One-night Jazz Stands

^yy MERICA is in a state of jazz/' sonorously
proclaim many religious bodies after seri
ous surveys of the saxophone situation.

I toured our forty-eight states recently and am
inclined to agree. Only of course, the religious
bodies and I are a little at variance in the mat
ter of definition. They regard the whole topic of
jazz as deplorable and I cannot, for many rea
sons, agree with them. By "state of jazz/' I merely
mean that the entire United States is whistling,
singing, playing, eating, and even working, to jazz.
Not to speak of undergoing operations and conva
lescing to it.

Moreover, the jazz interest in the smallest ham
let and biggest city alike is distributed in all direc
tions, so that at concerts, one gets bookworms, bank
presidents, village loafers and what not.

A great deal of the interest is only curiosity.

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Jazz

Much of it never develops into actual enthusiasm
and a lot of it is just plain scorn. But at least
we are getting people to think about u$ and argue
about us, which is a good sign for any enterprise.
I was more or less dubious when I prepared for a
jazz concert tour of the United States. And not
the least of my worries was the misgiving with which
my twenty-five bdys contemplated the trip. Two
or three of the new ones had never in their lives been
farther from Broadway than Boyle's Thirty Acres
in Jersey City, where Jack Dempsey licked Car-
pentier, and to hear them tell it, they cherished no
ambition to better their travel record.

They had, in short, all the real New Yorker's
prejudice against "the sticks." Many of my friends
shared the feeling. Some who have done time on
the two-a-day vaudeville circuits described country
hotels. Others, more sympathetic, encouraged me
by figuring that I could snatch an occasional respite
on Broadway, if life in the provinces grew too
difficult. The most confirmed New Yorkers are
those who have lived in Manhattan about six

months. These boys nearly wore me out with their

254

One-night Jazz Stands

solicitude* Altogether, I got so many condolences
that I began to feel very sorry for myself.

Besides, Paul Whiteman, Jr., had just reached a
most interesting age where he could sit up and take
notice of me whenever I hove into view. It was
about this time that I observed he even seemed to
cry for me.

So I felt sort of martyr-like when we set off for
our first stop somewhere in Maryland. I think it
was in Cumberland that I first had Maryland fried
chicken. Either there or Baltimore. Anyway, after
that, life looked different.

I could do a whole book on rare foods that my
doctor forcibly kept me from devouring as we went
along. Chicken and cream gravy at the Claypool
Hotel, Indianapolis, hot cakes, doughnuts and
strawberry short cake in Denver (mother-made!),
wiener wurst and sauerkraut in Minneapolis, corn-
bread in Louisville there is no end to the food
lore I picked up. But my doctor had a way of
condemning all indigenous food as fattening and a
rabid prejudice against my getting any fatter. So

that mostly, my life between concerts consisted in

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Jazz

glimpsing gorgeous food and being forbidden to
eat it.

The country we live in makes an interesting
movie taken in one-night stands. To my surprise,
after all the high-brow fun I'd heard poked at them,
Rotary and Kiwanis clubs weren't too awfully bad
and I heard lots of pleasant things their members
were doing for other people. Nor were these our
only cheerful findings about human nature. Hotel
men told me that only about one per cent, of the
traveling public beats its board bill. A Topeka
judge confided that only one man in a hundred
beats his wife nowadays. And we hit one town
where the citizens swear there isn't a single re
former* No, I won't tell its name. The inhabit
ants made me promise not to. They don't want
any increase in population. Which is another way
they are unique.

It's amazing how important a large population
is in the American scheme of things. Especially
to chambers of commerce. Of course we noticed
the chambers of commerce. It is impossible to
travel long in the United States without doing that.
I never heard so many statistics in my life as I

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One-night Jazz Stands

heard from them. I don't suppose anybody ever
checks them up, for they say the census takers are
very careless and leave out a good part of the pop
ulation in making a count. I mean the chambers
of commerce say this say it with startling
unanimity wherever you go.

I never knew there were so many firsts in the
world as there are in this country. Nothing is too
small to be first in. For a while I kept the
pamphlets and statistics that were lavished upon
me about our leading industries, but it seemed, on
the whole, that I might eventually have to get an
extra baggage car for the instruments if I kept on,
so I reluctantly sacrificed the statistics somewhere
between San Francisco and St. Paul.

I found out some things that maybe you don't
know. Of course, everybody knows that Grand
Rapids leads in furniture. But do you realize that
it also is first in fly-paper?

I wanted to see the fly-paper factories, but the
owner of them was evidently a suspicious person.
He wouldn't let me in. I tried to explain that I
had no desire to steal his secrets, but they told me
that manufacturing fly-paper is a very serious busi-

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Jazz

ness, with formulae for stickiness that must be
guarded in a vault. Did you ever smell a fly-paper
factory? We drove past this one. Terrible!

Battle Creek is another interesting place in
Michigan. It leads in doctors and health foods.
After dining at one "san" on a substitute for meat,
a substitute for sugar, meltoze, sterilized butter
and hot malted nuts topped off with minute brew,
which is a substitute for a much more exciting
drink, I felt so invigorated that I went out and
bought an ice cream soda and that led me to dis
cover another thing that Battle Creek is noted for
stands where you can buy ice cream sodas. I
fancy it is a reaction from the sanitary atmosphere.

Cities are like people hard-boiled or timid,
down at the heels or neatly mended up, showy or
plain, cheerful or glum. Most American cities are
cheerful, a little on the boastful side, fairly neat
rather like an American schoolboy, who hasn't had
many lickings and is a bit over-confident about
himself, yet diffident, too, underneath.

In spite of the prosperity, there is no subject so
prevalent as a conversation lead everywhere in the
United States as "hard times." We spend a deal

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One-night Jazz Stands

of energy worrying about trade conditions and the
taxes and the younger generation and the Reds and
jazz. A good many of us go abroad nowadays to
Paris and London, anyway. That is a sign of the
new prosperity. We call it "jumping across the
Big Pond," and we are always surprised at our
selves for having the courage to make a trip that
once was regarded as entirely the prerogative of the
very rich.

I used to make a game of judging from the smok
ing room conversation what section of the country
we were passing through. You could do it, too.
Not from the accent so much as from the actual
gist of the talk. If he didn't talk at all, you knew
he was an Easterner. And in the parts where we
were most of the time, he was in the minority.
Traveling through the West and Middle West,
everybody talked. As you go West, talk is put on
and coats and collars are put off. In the Missouri-
Kansas-Nebraska sector, you are treated to
intimacies from total strangers and you like it.
A Bostonian wouldn't, maybe. But why not?

There's a certain benevolence about people who

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Jazz

take you into their hearts and tell you their troubles
and their family history.

There were other invariables such as marbled
lobbies. This is something no hotel can be without.
Also there are conventions another hotel adjunct.
Men standing about uncertainly, wearing badges
and a subdued air red and white and blue badges.
Earnest talk, vigorous back slaps, self-conscious
guffaws when the talk grows lower in a group.

The American business man is curiously restless
on a holiday. He would rather be home, or at least
back at the office. He keeps long-distancing his
stenographer to be sure everything is going all right
in his absence.

"H'lo, thatchu, Miss Williams? Yah. Say
how's everything going? That so? Well, did
Jones come in? He never? That's funny. That's
awful funny. D'yu call him up? Well, you'd
better, if he don't come in first thing to-morrow.
Huh? Why, certainly it's important, Miss Wil
liams. I got to know what he proposes to do.
No, I won't bother about that. Huh? Well, I tell
you, call Jones up first thing in the morning and
then let me know what he says. And hello, hello,

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One-night Jazz Stands

Miss Williams, I guess I'll be home a day sooner
than I expected. There're several things Fm kinda
worried about. Yah well, don't forget to call
Jones. Goo'bye."

Women enjoy a hotel more than men. They like
to be free of responsibility and yet be able to sum
mon well-trained servants by pressing a button.
Bellboys say women are tipping better all but the
very prettiest ones. These seem to think their
beauty is enough.

My favorite hobby on the road was collecting
hotel signs. Out in Arizona, I got one that said
in large black letters: * "Women, do not take men
to your rooms. Ladies will not."

In Texas, mine host welcomed us hospitably:
"We want you to feel at home. If you spit on the
floor at home, spit on the floor here/'

It is Illinois where they have some kind of law
about all the berths being extra-long. A news
paper man in Springfield suggested that Lincoln,
whose home it was, might have been responsible
for the law, he being a long man. If he was, that
is simply one more benefaction of his to the human
race. I got a permanent crick in my back from

261

Jazz

much scrooging down to fit inadequate beds and
sheets.

In New Jersey, we ran across the father of one
of the most successful Broadway stars acting as
taxi starter in a hotel. In Kansas City, a girl
threatened to commit suicide unless we gave her a
letter of introduction to David Belasco.

Everywhere we were besieged by youngsters
trying to get into jazz bands. Sometimes it was
a colored bellboy who proudly informed us that he
was running a jazz band on the side. Not infre
quently, an ambitious parent of the town's smartest
set would bring her boy to play for us. Folks
lugged in musical compositions to be judged and
instruments to be tuned and tested. We tried to
see everybody, because you never know when you
will miss a genius.

In Cleveland, we went on trial ourselves trial
by jury. Twelve prominent men and women in
terested in music, but not professionally connected
with it, put us on the witness stand and found us
"not guilty of being an absolute menace, but at the
same time greatly in need of correction and refine
ment." Perhaps that was letting us off easy.

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O n e -ni g Jit Jazz Stands

It was also in Cleveland that the pupils in the
continuation schools handed in written opinions of
jazz. A college sophomore said jazz is worth while
because it dulls care. And a meat packer taking
a course in science said it was all wrong because it
dulls the soul.

One of the high spots of the tour for me came
in Providence when Rachmaninoff, the Russian
composer, postponed a trip for six days to come to
our concert. And he liked us, too, so he said.

In Washington, I found out that men are the
true supporters of jazz. Miss Jessie MacBride,
critic on the Washington Times, pointed out that
in an afternoon audience more than fifty per cent,
were men. That was a record for that city. And
later, we found that three-fifths of our Boston
audiences were men middle-aged, too. I thought
that was a good argument for jazz* Men don't
usually care for concerts.

Boston was one of the surprises the trip held.
We were prepared to be frozen out, having heard
of the traditional Boston antipathy to innovations.
Instead, we had capacity audiences and a request to
play an extra performance.

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Jazz

One of the oddest concerts was at Williamsport,
Pa., where we had a concert scheduled for Sunday
evening. Unluckily, the ministers selected us for
an issue and hauled out the blue laws which made
us illegal on the Sabbath. Then our advance rep
resentative, Estella Karn, had an idea. Why not
start the concert at a minute past midnight, which
would make it Monday morning? We did, with
great hilarity and a packed house.

It is hard to tell why an orchestra gives a better
performance one time than another. Partly, I sup
pose, it is the way the members are feeling but
mainly, I think, it has to do with the spirit of the
audience. And I doubt if we ever played better
even in San Francisco or Denver, both of which
were home, than we did on our first visit to Chi
cago, That warm glow that can cross the foot
lights started out front and ran right back stage,
Since then, I've thought of Chicago as the jolly,
friendly, self-made millionaire of cities, with the
heartiest hand clasp of all.

The Denver concert was the hardest for me. No
wonder, for while it's great to get home, there are
too many people who know you. You have to be

264

One-night Jazz Stands

on your toes every minute to make them think you
are any good and if you seem to esteem yourself
too highly, they're likely to decide you have the
bighead.

In Denver, the fellows knew me when I had
a paper route and was the champion hotcake and
chili eater of the town. Anyway, I showed 'em I
could still hold down that record ! That show was
probably better than the concert, but the concert
went off all right, too, except that my voice gave out
on me when I tried to make a speech.

New Orleans, being the home of jazz, is inter
esting to jazzists. There are as many theories
about the original jazz band in New Orleans as
there are bands in the city to-day. And that is
legion.

The most entertaining jazz figure is Stale Bread,
a blind jazz musician, who may have invented
jazz, for all I know. Stale Bread has a real name
Lacoume, I believe, but nobody ever remembers
it. He lost his sight twenty-five years ago and in
his blindness has taught himself to play the banjo,
the piano, the trap drums, the guitar, the mandolin

265

Jazz

and the bass viol. His first love is New Orleans,
his next, jazz.

"New Orleans is the jazz university of the coun
try," he boasts. "You let a musician tell any
bunch in the world that he learned his jazz in New
Orleans and they'll give him a chance to show his
stuff."

There were eight members of Stale Bread's orig
inal band. These were known about town as
Piggy, Family Haircut, Warm Gravy, Booze
Bottle, Seven Colors, Whiskey and Monk.

The band hang-out was the old Newsboys'
Home on Barronne Street. Stale Bread was the
organizer. His instruments were a cheese box for a
banjo, a soap box guitar, a cigar box violin and
a half barrel bass fiddle. He had also an old
tambourine, a zither and a harmonica.

The leader trained his gang until the noise they
made was adequate even to their small-boy ears.
Then he took them out to play on the street. In
no time at all, he was blocking traffic. A sour-face
complained and a cop pinched the band. He
brought them into court and the judge, trying not
to laugh, ordered them to play in their own defense.

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One-night Jazz Stands

It was a great moment in the life of the little
blind boy. He rose gravely, bowed to "Hiz-
zoner," and the spectators, raised a piece of wood
that he used for a baton, and the dirty, ragged eight
began. Stale Bread thinks that was the first time
any; court in the world ever heard jazz. The judge
listened solemnly. When the last fearful note
died, he turned to the leader.

"Stale Bread," said he, "you may be a band, but
you're a spasm band. Discharged/'

The name stuck and the spasm band went on
playing. Stale Bread is still playing playing and
talking jazz.

John Robichaux and John Piron, New Orleans
orchestra leaders who claim to have been present
at the birth of jazz, believe that the great American
noise started along the water front among natural
Negro musicians and developed into the heart and
soul of New Orleans.

They are very proud of jazz in New Orleans but
critical of visiting brands. "Takes N'Awleens to
show *em real jazz," they maintain.

When we got to St. Louis, we found all the po*
licemen out with guns. For awhile we felt a little

267

Jazz

uncertain whether this was a greeting or a precau
tion. It turned out to be merely police drill.

In this Missouri city lives John Stark, original
rag man, now eighty-four years old. Mr. Stark
still publishes and sells ragtime. He is a gentle
soul about everything else, but jazz is anathema
to him and jazz makers not much better. He calls
his establishment the "classic rag house," and from
it, he issued the original "Maple Leaf Rag" of
Scott Joplin, purchased for something like fifteen
dollars.

We couldn't get Mr. Stark to come to our con
cert. I have a feeling he may have wished the
police had used their guns that day we arrived.

Perhaps, all along the line there were people who
shared this sentiment. But I trust and believe not
in Texas* In Texas, everybody loves jazz and jazz
makers. The hotter the jazz is, the better they like
it, too. The only time they resented us was when
they got the idea we were trying to be highbrow.
We played before Governor Ma Ferguson in
Austin. I like women governors seems to me
women are cut out for that sort of thing.

Two of the band were arrested in Texas because
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O n e -ni glit Jazz Stands

they left their hotel after midnight to get some
thing to eat. They weren't familiar with customs
in these wide open spaces.

There are several kinds of risks when you travel
with a gang as full of pep as mine. A successful
concert demands every player in his place and feel
ing right up to the mark. So we had to keep out
of fights, jails and epidemics. Our doctor usually
had the fellows drink ginger ale instead of water,
so they wouldn't catch germs. That doctor spent
most of his time on my trail, though. He made me
cut out meat, bread and potatoes. If I was very
good, he let me have a second helping of spinach
every other day. Once I lost fifty pounds and got
down to 230.

I think our tour was one of the longest ever at
tempted by a full orchestra. We played every
town and city of any note in the North and South
all the way through El Paso to Los Angeles and
San Francisco and then back through the Middle
West. In Jackson, Mississippi, Billy Sunday
closed church to come out and hear us.

Lots of courtesies were shown us and we had a
good time, though we worked hard. The "family"

269

Jazz

got to be great little jokers and we used always to
be playing silly pranks on one another with the
audience sometimes in on the joke, sometimes not.

One evening I put some black gum on my front
teeth, making it look as if three or four were out,
and the boys nearly broke down from laughter.
The next night, while I was off stage, they rigged
themselves out in whiskers made of false hair as
an impromptu surprise for me.

The tour turned me into a perpetual information
bureau. Girls wanted to know what was the Prince
of Wales' favorite musical instrument and were his
eyes really blue?

"Will saxophone playing injure the voice?"
anxious mothers asked. "How do you organize a
jazz band?" "Do you really make as much money
as the paper said?" "Can you recommend a hotel
in New York where I could go with two children?
I have heard lots of hotels in New York don't allow
children."

I got used to speaking to women's clubs and
shaving in a rocking Pullman, though I was heckled
sometimes by the clubs and cut myself a time 01
two at the shaving.

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One-night Jazz Stands

I wouldn't take anything for my months on the
road. I feel that I know America and Americans
better than I ever did before. I believe I can con
duct an orchestra better because of my one-night
standing and I am going to do it over every year
until I've proved that jazz is music.

271

XIV

The Future of Jazz

XIV: The Future of Jazz

///HAT will be the end of jazz? I don't

know. Nobody knows. One may only

speculate. Perhaps my ideas on such a nebulous

subject are as likely to be sound as the next man's.

I don't know.

Anyway, I am no prophet, I can only say what
seems to me possible and a very little probable.

First of all, jazz has a chance because it is a
sheer Americanism. Artistic Europe grants this
and applauds. Have Europeans ever accepted any
other music of ours? Alas, no! We have assim
ilated the arts of Europe, yet made none of them
our own. As W. J. Henderson, New York musical
critic, puts it: "Up to the beginning of the nine
teenth century, we produced nothing which still
moves before us/ 3

If we made a play, it was patterned after Far-
quhar, or Sheridan. When we painted a portrait,

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Jazz

we fixed a reverent gaze on Sir Joshua Reynolds.
When we fashioned a public building, we bowed
before the shrines of Wren and Gibbs.

Our music followed the same lines. And that
is not the best way. We'd not have had a Ford
if we had been satisfied with European ways nor
perhaps a phonograph, nor a steamboat, nor a sky
scraper. It is something to branch out at last for
ourselves in music as in other efforts. This does
not mean of course that we shall immediately
create art. But then, neither does the fact that
many look upon jazz as a sort of artistic blasphemy
mean that it is so. We jazzists might reply to
those who are shocked at what they call bizarre
sounds evoked by our instruments, as Turner did
to his lady critic.

"Mr. Turner," said the dame, "I never see such
colors in the sunset as you see."

"Don't you wish you could, ma'am?" reparteed
the painter.

Turner was ahead of his generation and knew it.
Perhaps we jazzists are ahead of ours. But I must
confess in all humbleness that we have moments

276

The Future of Jazz

when we doubt this as much as any of those who
cavil.

We are encouraged occasionally by musicians
like Leopold Stokowski, John Alden Carpenter and
Fritz Kreisler who tell us that jazz will live. We
wish there were more of them writing jazz. They
could answer the jeers directed at our infant art
better by composition than by words.

Not that I for one am greatly affected by criti
cism* Was it not Mendelssohn who, when asked
what was the root of the strong discord at the
opening of the c< Wedding March," replied, "I don't
know and I don't care." Even the law-abiding
Haydn called the rules of music his servants and
wrote consecutive fifths that must have shocked the
academic of the time.

When Beethoven began his first symphony with
a discord, all the orthodox were scandalized.
They might even have accused him of "jazzing it
up," if the phrase had been invented then. The
new is always bearing the brunt of our human ten
dency to find fault. That doesn't matter. What
does matter is that there have been advances in
jazz which prove that the material has something

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Jazz

worth while. The soft jazz rhythms of the pres
ent day represent great progress from the crudities
of ten years ago.

Because it must be played by Americans to be
well-played, jazz is giving the young musician his
chance. It will continue to do that. It has al
ready compelled the musical world to take George
Gershwin seriously. He has been commissioned to
write for the New York Symphony. But he was
never taken seriously until the "Rhapsody in
Blue/' though he had been writing musical revues
and popular songs for a long time.
. Some day, it will be with jazz here as it is with
the races in England. Everybody who can scrape
together a few shillings goes to the races. They
are a national institution. Jazz^will be^ari^mer-
Jg^j^iojial institution^

Every boy, whether he is normally musically in
clined or not, wants to learn to play something.
Jazz has given him the opportunity of his life and
something is going to come of it. Perhaps that
something will be a new art. Certainly it will be
a good deal of musical composition, some of it very
bad and some of it, I hope, very good.

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The Future o /, J az z

Will it be possible eventually to establish chairs
of jazz in universities? I do not see why not. My
conception of a college is a place which teaches its
students that which will be useful and pleasant for
them to know. Jazz music is certainly useful-
Players who have worked their way through college
blowing a saxophone or twanging a banjo can often
step into jobs that pay $75 or $100 a week. I mean
jazz banding jobs. Tell me any other occupation
that starts the June graduate off at any such
salary.

An example of the financial possibilities of the
jazz band is furnished by Roger Wolfe Kahn, son
of Otto Kahn, wealthy New York banker and art
patron. This youth of seventeen has an income
of $1,000 a week from his five bands, while his
friends, starting in to learn the banking business
from the bottom up, receive less than a quarter
of his weekly wage per month.

One of the first conceits my orchestra played
after the debut at Aeolian Hall was a benefit for
the Academy at Rome. The story got about that
the money taken in was to be used to establish a
chair of jazz at the foreign institution. A lot of

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Jazz

people got terribly excited. They wrote letters to
the newspapers and inveighed against such a
scheme, predicting the fall of everything that was
high and holy in music. I hope they will live to
see what a jazz chair will do to civilization. For
I think they may be agreeably surprised.

One thing must happen before the future of jazz
can be assured. That is, the critics must stop com
paring jazz and symphony orchestras. Such a
comparison is not fair. The symphony is one thing
in instrumentation, scoring and direction. We
are quite another. To my mind comparing us is
almost as silly as the talk of a jazz opera. I do
not believe there can be a real jazz opera. There
is too much contradiction of terms. The very
theme of jazz is unfitted to opera. The operatic
form was built for folk lore. You can't fit such a
form to the romance, say, of the skyscraper which
is, after all, an expression of jazz.

Nor do I see why anybody would want to.
Every honest musician must concede that grand
opera is the worst possible form of music. In fact,
it is not music at all it is a hash of music, drama
and tableau in which they all are debased. Think

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The Future of Jazz

of gargling for half an hour to express toe simple
fact that one is hungry. Yet that, or an equal
absurdity, is what happens in every known opera.
Opera is one of my favorite sports when I have time
to spend at it, but nobody can deny that its music
moves slowly, held back and forced to mark time
while the drama catches up with it and the stage
hands shift scenery. Jazz does not move slowly.
Anything written around a jazz theme would have
to be a musical show, not an opera. I do not see
why we should not have this. But for goodness*
sake, let's throw away the old forms and create our
own new ones.

Either jazz is something that can dispense with
known forms and make a form of its own, or else
it is nothing. America has a marvelous chance just
now to get even with Europe. For the first time,
Europeans are interested in something besides our
dollar. They eat up our simplest jazz trick. When
I was in France a few years ago, the Paris Conserv
atory sent a representative to ask for jazz scores
for their library. I suggested other American com
positions to them, but they said they wanted jazz.

All the records of the past seem, if not to point

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Jazz

to the future greatness of jazz, at least to argue
that it has a chance. When Wagner's music was
first presented, it was even more revolting to the
esthetic ear than jazz is now. Clara Schumann in
1879 confided to her diary: "I have been glancing
through a number of new musical productions and
feel depressed. The influence of Wagner is far-
reaching and injurious. No one cares any more
for melody. The way people fling harmony about
is something terrible. Resolutions are considered
unnecessary."

And then there was the sarabande. To-day the
word brings up to most of our minds the slow and
stately rhythms of Bach or Handel. It makes us
think of noble and dignified strains in sonatas and
operas of the eighteenth century. Yet the sara-
bande, when the restless younger generation in the
Spain of 1588 took to dancing it, was more of a
blow to the orthodox than is the most shocking jazz
to-day to the same class.

Father Mariana, writing in 1609, accused the
sarabande of having done more harm than the bu
bonic plague which devastated Europe in the
Middle Ages. Yet eventually this outrageous af-

282

The Future of Jazz

front to the morals of the unco' guid became the
inspiration for some of the greatest musical com
posers.

The Waltz had almost as stormy an introduc
tion. Lord Byron had something to say of this in
novation :

"Not soft Herodias, with winding tread, her nimble feet

danced off another's head;
Not Cleopatra on her galley's deck, displayed so much of

limb or more of neck
Than thou, ambrosial waltz."

Perhaps these instances of the past prove noth
ing, after all, except the need for a certain generos
ity and tolerance. Still, if one were attempting
to be a prophet, it might not be bad logic to predict
that some day jazz will mean what sarabande does
to-day. At any rate, jazz, though maligned, is in
a better position than were the German operas in
France during the period that a man could be put
into jail for whistling one of them.

There is a parallel of the past to be drawn, too,
between jazz and folk songs. What folk song
would have amounted to anything if some great
writer had not put it into a symphony? Jazz
wears elaborate garments well, too. Why may one

283

Jazz

not hope to see it one day dressed in the best? Not
in symphony, but in some new and equally beau
tiful garment of its own. Folk songs are simple
melodies. The harmonic setting is wholly unim
portant, yet these tunes have been used as themes
by the greatest. Jazz is elemental, too. Like the
folk song, it meets and satisfies an undeveloped
esthetic and emotional craving.

A further comfort for those who hope for some
thing better in the future of jazz lies in the fact
that the jazz music movement is accompanied by
the same tendency in art and literature. A move
ment so widespread seems bound by all the laws of
chance to contribute something of permanence.

Sometimes I am asked how the jazzists will
average when the pendulum swings back .as many
think it will and the standard becomes "thought
rather than spirits, quality rather than color,
knowledge rather than irreticence, intelligence
rather than singularity, wit rather than romp, pre
cision rather than surprise, and dignity rather than
impudence."

I confess I do not see why these should be the
standards. After all emotion is the foundation of

284

The Future of Jazz

art as it is of life. And certainly jazz has enough
of emotion and to spare.

I wish our jazz discussions could spare the in
vectives. Even defending jazz, one is inclined to
be defiant. If one could remain amused and aloof,
it would accomplish more letting, as a Washing
ton reviewer put it, "the nose glasses fight over
whether or not jazz is music."

"One can take it or leave it," adds this irreverent
critic, "for here it is, thumbing its snippy nose at
the sticks-in-the-mud, the high and holy. If it is
just a glorious joke on elderly musicians, it is a
good one."

I like to remember that it was after he had heard
my orchestra that Dr. Leopold Stokowski, inter
nationally known conductor of the Philadelphia
symphony, gave out an interview declaring that
jazz had come to stay. He did not prophesy that
jazz itself would ascend to true greatness, but held
that it was an epoch-making influence, the tendency
of which might bring about a revolution in the
whole world of music. He predicted that, through
the influence of America, the entire art will be vul
garized in the best sense of the word and enter

285

Jazz

more and more into the daily life of the people, in
fluencing them and becoming part of their philos
ophy. He pointed out three obvious trends which
have sprung from jazz.
First, he said, there is a

which will either necessitate the re
building of all instruments now in use or a reform
in the method of their use since to play it requires
an instrument for many hands.

The second trend was toward the development
^ with the eventual combination of

visual color symphonies and tonal effects.

Third, he saw the development of music into
multiple jforms Jn which there would be the elim
ination of prohibition in music so that all forms
would be permitted, with the result of greater
variety to appeal to all sorts of people.

The quarter tone idea in music is of particular
interest to the orchestra* The orchestra is ob
viously the one and only "musical instrument with
many hands." May not jazz development there
fore lend a widespread movement toward com
munity play? Instead of one musician with piano
and violin, two, three, four or six persons may play

286

The F uture of Jazz

together, indeed must play together if they are to
use the greatly extended, beautifully flexible scale
of greater tones. Thus, perhaps music will be put
back into its proper place in the home and the com
munity, making it in American towns what it is
already in European village life a vital factor.
Perhaps that is far-fetched but it seems to me
it might come.

I am ambitious for jazz to develop always in an
American way. I want to see compositions written
around the great natural and geographical features
of American life written in the jazz idiom. I be
lieve this would help Americans to appreciate their
own country their Hudson, their Grand Canyon,
their Painted Desert. There is thematic material
in each of these. True, we have no lorelized rocks,
no mouse castles on the Hudson, That is because
we are not old enough. We must make traditions.
It is time we began. Jazz can help by catching
our national themes fast in composition.

I want jazz to give the young musician his
chance. The unknown composer has to pay to get
his compositions played by a good symphony. And
he usually has no money so his chance is gone. I

287

Jazz

hope jazz is going to give him his chance. It must
for its hope lies in him in youth.

The charge that has been made is true jazz is
all dressed up and has hardly any place to go.
That is because so few composers are writing for
it. The best of them are too old and serious-
minded for jazz. They don't dance. They don't
catch the rhythm of the younger generation. We
must look to jhe ypUDgjfote for the jazz compo^i-
tLQns,^of,.theJ'uturc We must see that music be
comes as much an education staple in this country
as reading or spelling. Who goes to symphony
concerts to-day^ Except for music students,
mostly men and women over forty.

There is only one way to educate an American
except in his chosen line. That way is by enter
tainment. And we must start the entertainment in
the school room. Since the high-brow composer will
not write jazz music, we must train the popular
composer to become a better musician. We must
teach the rhythmic invention, the contrapuntal
construction and formal variety needed in the best
of jazz composition. When this is done, I venture

288

The Future of Jazz

to say that the future of modern American music
will reveal itself soon enough.

Of course, what jazz really needs is a fairy god
mother to endow it. So far there has been no
chance to take time off for experimentation. No
millionaire has come forward to offer the necessary
funds for laboratory work. It is not so easy to
keep only the best when one must at the same time
be thinking of how to make one's bread and butter.
But we shall keep trying until perhaps we find
the fairy godmother !

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XV
As for Me

XV: As for Me

RE you really going to devote your life
to jazz*?" asked a friend who hates jazz,

I didn't answer at once because I never before
had looked so far ahead but when the answer did
come, it was yes.

I don't know exactly what my life will be worth
to jazz, but such as it is, I offer it gladly. Jazz
has been good to me. As they say in the cigarette
ads, it satisfies. It gives me, first, a medium of
musical expression. It affords a field for experi
mentation. It has won me a certain amount of
recognition among people whose opinion I esteem
and it has paid me well financially. In this last
respect, it is a good deal more profitable to lead a
jazz orchestra than to be president.

And when I see what a worry it is to be pres
ident, I can't help preferring my own job. On the
whole, I have rather a full and interesting life as

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Jazz

does any man who is doing work he likes. I live
in the country in summer, near enough the ocean
so that I can get a swim after work. I am a dub
at golf, but possess one friend I can beat.

I find time occasionally for the theater, books
(mostly on music), romps with my boy, talks with
my wife just a commonplace American man. If
it were not too trite, I should say here that my wife
is my best pal and severest critic. Mrs. Whiteman
was, before her marriage, Vanda Hoff, a well-
known dancer, and she knows and loves music.
She goes to all our rehearsals and tells me how
terrible they are.

I get mad, of course, and she calmly keeps on
talking. In spite of myself, I listen and generally
end by thinking pretty much as she does. The only
time we really quarrel is when she threatens to
throw out my locomotives which she says mess up
the house.

I shall go blithely on insisting that jazz is the
real American music, To prove my assertion, I
shall play all of it that I can lay my hands on, the
more pretentious the better. Young composers
may have the assurance at all times that ours is one

294

As for Me

organization from which the native product may
get a hearing. Whether jazz will make music or
not cannot be settled by arguing about it. The
only way is to try it out.

I have dozens of experiments to make with jazz.
I am convinced that it has therapeutic value. I
believe a way will be found to use it in curing dis
eases of mind and body, especially melancholia that
amounts eventually to insanity. Music has been
used by Southern planters of all time to speed up
work among the negroes used to such an extent
that special song leaders were hired on the same
basis as workmen.

So far there has been no serious attempt to em
ploy music in practical everyday life. I think this
will all come. Already it has been ascertained that
a person totally deaf gets certain vibrations from
jazz music which raise the pulse beat and produce
all the symptoms of exhilaration.

Being a jazz missionary is not the easiest job in
life. Frankly, the ultimate purpose is to raise the
public taste until it will accept a full evening of
serious music. But it is a ticklish business, trying

295

Jazz

to put jazz in the position of being recognized as
a serious medium.

On the one hand, we must not dash at once into
music that sends away the very ones we ;want to
educate. On the other, we must not offend the per
sons whose approval we need. So for a time, our
progress must be a compromise.

Meantime, there is considerable cheering news
from the front. Siegfried Wagner, son of the
famous writer of music drama, who visited this
country not so very long ago, thinks jazz "is a
step to real musical achievement." Levitski, well-
know pianist, plays jazz for his own amusement,
and Mrs. Kreisler complains that since her husband
discovered jazz, he scarcely ever practices just
plays jazz. Eva Gauthier, singer, has placed jazz
on her concert programs. Darius Milhaud and Igor
Stravinski have been influenced by jazz rhythms
in their work and admit it. We have Leo Sowerby,
young American composer, doing "Synconata" and
other pieces for the jazz orchestra, and and Ernest
Schelling, John Alden Carpenter, Cole Porter,
Deems Taylor, George Gershwin and Ferde Grofe
experimenting with the idiom.

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A s for Me

Once in a while, too, comes a letter like the one
from Rudolph Gans, conveying kindly sentiments
about what we are trying to do and adding: "I
can listen to well- written and well-played jazz for
quite a while with pleasure, sometimes with
emotion."

To be sure, Mr. Gans presently admits, "and
then I get tired of it, to say the least. But so would
I feel overcome by a program of purely sentimental
romantic music. Anyway, legitimate dance music
has never been so beautifully symphonic as now
and has never been as melodically and harmoni
cally satisfying as in the outstanding works written
in jazz form and jazz spirit to-day. Melodically,
however, it has been to a great extent at the expense
of the recognized masters of music. This is to be
regretted."

For the rest, there is at least one place in the
world where tired ears may rest assured they will
not hear jazz strains. That is in an English jail.
I hear that the Commissioners of Prisons for Great
Britain have banned all jazz music, finding it too
amusing.

However, I shall not try a British jail as a jazz
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Jazz

refuge. When I am finished with jazz, or it is fin
ished with me, I shall retire to a certain ranch near
Denver a ranch that jazz built and there, per
haps who knows? spend my declining years
among the classics.

THE END

298